CE -- A lifetime of collecting comic related material :: Disney Studio Pt. 2 - Cels and Backgrounds *

Background Painting from The Robber Kitten, 1935

Artist: Walt Disney Studio (All)

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Background Painting from The Robber Kitten, 1935 Comic Art

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Artwork Details

Title:	Background Painting from The Robber Kitten, 1935
Artist:	Walt Disney Studio (All)
Media Type:	Paint - Watercolor
Art Type:	Animation
For Sale Status:	NFS
Views:	764
Likes on CAF:	0 1
Comments:	0
Added to Site:	4/7/2013
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Description

Although animation art was collected by a relatively small number of persons before the sale of John Basmajian's collection at Christie's East in NYC on December 8, 1984, the publicity generated from the record prices of DIsney cels and background paintings at that historic sale made collecting animation art fashionable. I was the second person to register as a bidder at the Basmajian sale, and the first purchaser of one of the items auctioned. This humble background from my favorite DIsney short cartoon just happened to be the first lot in the sale.

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Collecting Disney Background Paintings, Part 9. cont.

I will end with what is probably my biggest failure as a collector of Disney animation art. Included in the last live auction of animation art by Howard Lowery, in the early 2000s, was a matching cel and background setup of the scene in which the Princess Aurora under Maleficent's spell reaches out to the spindle of a spinning wheel on which she pricks her finger AND DIES! Sorry, I know how it ends, but I got carried away in the moment. The spinning wheel was not painted on the background but was on a separete, full technarama cel, along with airbrshed glow effects. The artwork wasn't fabulous, but I thought it was well worth owning the primary image of the features first climactic scene. The bidding wasn't too heated and I bought the piece. And I actually thought enough of the setup, which came framed, that I hung it on a prominent wall. Several months later I was disussing the setup in front of a former assistant to Dave Smith of the Disney archives. She interjected that I didn't really have a spinning wheel cel but only the effects cel which served t define the outline of the missing spinning wheel. I was pretty upset, since I felt mislead by the absence of this fact in the auction catalogue. I no longer enjoyed looking at the piece and eventually traded it for a great piece of Disney character/concept art. More months passed and then, my friend who had traded for the Sleeping Beauty, which he subsequently sold to a collector, told me that the new owner had dissassembled the frame that had been included when I had bought the art. And, to his great good fortune, he found that all the original cel levels were actually present, including the actual cel with the spinning wheel along with the separate special effects cel. They had just been framed in the wrong order, causing the spinning wheel to be greatly obscured under the glow cel instead of being visible as the uppermost cel!!! I wasn't pleased -- I never thought that there was a problem but was given erroneous information by someone I assumed knew better than I did.Live and learn, and at least I love my story painting of the pegasus family from Fantasia. My thoughts about collecting Disney cels begin under the next jpg.

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	C E
Joined:	April 2006
Last Login:	August 2025
Country:	UNITED STATES
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