These are all the original watercolors for the Good Housekeeping page based on the Mickey Mouse short, Moving Day. This was one of only about 10 Good Housekeeping pages which included all three of Disney's major characters, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy.
The Story of the Final Art for the Disney Good Housekeeping Pages:
I first became aware of Disney Good Housekeeping watercolors in late 1983 or early 1984. I had already collected a complete set of the actual printed Disney pages after having come across them at paper shows, and I had several examples of the pencil art on which the painted artwork was based. But I was incredibly impressed when my animation art dealer friend in the San Fernando Valley showed me a number of originals which he had just bought, 4 of the 5 pieces for each of the Mickey's Parrot, Donald's Lucky Day, and Good Scouts pages from 1938. He told me that the person he got them from had kept one of each from each page, which turned out to be false. Although they were dirty, and even though several were oddly shaped due to being cut so that the individual illustrations could be laid out with the printed text, they were still just wonderful, with very bright colors and the same incredible draftsmanship as found in the pencil drawings. That first day I wanted to buy the Mickey's Parrot title piece, with Mickey and Pluto, but I was told that someone else wanted it as well and my friend would have to think about what to do. So I bought the equally great title piece for the Good Scouts page for the then high price of $650. It took a while to clean the piece up with an art gum eraser, but it looked great after a lot of rubbing. The best piece of the Donald's Lucky Day page was missing, and the one I liked best of those available had a small water stain on it. A few days later, I went back and bought another piece from Lucky Day, which was undamaged but he a small piece of one corner clipped off as part of the layout process. And then, one evening, my friend called me about the Mickey's Parrot that I badly wanted.
He had decided to have a little telephlne auction for the Mickey. I played along, but I wasn';t at all happy that he wouldn't just sell it to me, since I was by far his biggest buyer. And, of course, the price just kept going up, as I grew more and more angry. When I was going to have to pay at least $1,300, double what I had just paid for the Good Scouts piece, I cursed him out and hung up!
A few months later my friend confessed that he had all five pieces for each of the three pages all along, but that he was keeping one of each for himself. That would, of course, be fine, if he ever actually kept anything for long and if he hadn't lied to me, but whatever. I was lucky that I didn't like the piece he kept from Good Scouts nearly as much as the one I bought that first day. I bought the best piece from Lucky Day about 7 years later when my friend, who I hadn't been buying from for several months after what he had done over the Sleeping Beauty background [as described under the photo of the background with Princess Aurora's birth presents] -- he "bought" back my friendship by selling me the Good Housekeeping piece. And I finally bought the Mickey's Parrot piece, for almost four times what I was unwilling to pay during the "auction," when the winner of that competition was raising money to join a country club.
My friend bought 4 out of 5 pieces for the Beach Picnic and Antarctic Trappers pages about 6 months after his first haul ... this time I believe that he really did n't get the fifth pieces, and I bought one from each group of pieces he had gotten from the two new pages. I only bought an Antarctic Trappers piece, which was horribly cut, because I had the corresponding pencil drawing.
So where did this art come from. I soon found out that an east coast comic book art dealer had obtained all the artwork from January 1938 onward. It was reportedly found in Good Housekeeping Magazine's files. I heard from a Boston area dealer that that dealer had originally charged $1,000 or $1,200 per complete, usually five piece, page, and he was charging $1,500 when I enquired which pages he still had. Unfortunately, the best pages were already sold. My friend had actually bought some of the very best from the 1938-1939 period. The original seller had apparetly kept only two pieces for himself, the title pieces for Donald's Golf Game, with Donald and Goofy, and The Pointer, with Mickey and Pluto. I later bought the Donald from the Boston area dealer and The Pointer piece was eventually reunited with the other four pieces from that page.
