A beautiful original production cel of Bashful from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, presented in its original Courvoisier Galleries setup against an airbrushed starry-night background.
Snow White was released in 1937 and it changed everything. The first feature-length animated film, it proved that an audience would sit for ninety minutes with drawn characters and feel something real, and the dwarfs were the emotional engine of that proof. Each one carried a whole personality in a name and a handful of gestures, and Bashful is perhaps the purest of them, a character whose entire nature is written into the way he holds himself. To animate that shyness convincingly, frame after frame, was exactly the kind of problem Disney's team was solving for the first time here, and solving better than anyone had managed before.
The ink and paint work rewards a close look. The hand-inking is meticulous, a fine contour line separating the warm blush of the cheek from the shadow falling across the nose, and a secondary ink line defining the tonal break across the beard that gives the face its depth. This is a full-figure cel, the complete character on a single sheet, which makes it a more complete compositional statement than the partial cels and in-betweens that make up most surviving material from the production. Eighty-seven years on, the condition is excellent throughout.
Courvoisier Galleries, who handled Disney art from 1938, were the first to present production cels publicly as fine art, pairing studio-used cels with specially prepared backgrounds, here the airbrushed blue field scattered with silver stars, and mounting them as finished pieces. That presentation was always conceived as the artwork itself, and it remains the benchmark for early Disney collecting.
A cel in its original Courvoisier setup, background and mount intact, is a different proposition entirely from a loose cel of the same vintage.
Estimate: £3,000 - £6,000 † Δ
See Online Here: 212. Bashful Original Production Cel on Courvoisier Background ### SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
