The Story of the Original watercolors for the Disney Good Housekeeping Pages, Pt. 3
Many of the best, complete pages from the 1934 - 1937 period were displayed and offered for sale at the 1991 San Diego con. The speculators who had cornered the market were still asking huge prices for the art for some of the most famous Disney shorts, such as The Band Concert, Don Donald, and Mickey's Fire Brigade. To my knowledge none of them sold. Even if some were purchased at that time, the art didn't find permanent homes. The speculators seem to have largely lost interest in Disney Good Housekeeping art, and most of the finest examples have turned up at auctions in more recent years, selling for about $20,000 or less -- some have realized as little as $3,000 or so at auction.
In my opinion, the market for the Good Housekeeping originals is very unlikely to recover to any significant degree. The art has been tarnished as being unsaleable, even though a market could have developed if the prices had been within the reach of the few collectors who might have been interested. For reasons which are incomprehensible to me, all Disney publicity art has been widely considered among animation art collectors as somehow less desirable than "production art," i.e., animation art which was created to produce the final film images. This prejudice seems to have very recently started to dissipate, largely due to the high prices realized at auctions for Disney poster designs for short cartoons. But the major problem in selling most of the Good Housekeeping watercolors for high prices is that the colors of many originals have faded, in some instances very badly.
The Good Housekeeping art that has been displayed over the past 30 to 35 years in rooms with significant sunlight and without proper protection, are now ghosts of what they were when they first appeared on the market. I am attaching a couple of examples as additional images, above. This fading seems to never be acknowledged by the companies which auction the damaged pages, but it is obvious to anyone who knew the once-glorious colors of the artwork. There are some exceptions, however, namely the examples of this art which were framed with UF-3 or similar plexiglass or glass, which filter out the fading rays of light (whether sunlight or light from florescent bulbs).
There was a group of complete sets of watercolors for GH pages that were apparently held back when Alexander Acevedo made his big purchase of the earlier art. Two of these, for Moving Day and Cock o' the Walk, turned up in a Sotheby's sale in the mid-1990s. I bought the Moving Day page at that sale. I believe that the Elmer Elephant and the Tortoise and the Hare pages, both of which have sold at auction within the past few years (before 2021) were also from the group of pages which had never before been on the market. And there is at least one page, of the Robber Kitten, which I have never known to have been sold. The four pages which were auctioned after the Acevedo purchase, were all in the same gold frames, and they all must have had UF plexiglass protection, since all the watercolors are still totally unfaded, just as all the GH art appeared when it first emerged. But it may be too late for collectors to pay attention to this form of publicity art or to realize that the colors don't necessarily fade over time so long as proper precautions are taken.
