D.A. sent me a watercolor of idyllic seaside Hawaiian villagers hard at work pulling in fishing nets. D.A. bought this image 30 years ago in a now defunct thrift store. A few years back she found menu covers from a cruise line with this image on the front cover. Her painting is signed H. Bauer ’62. This classification called “paper ephemera” is a great field to collect because well-printed paper material became obsolete.
What D.A. owns an original commissioned by a cruise line from Bauer, who created original menu covers, sometimes for each meal served on a voyage. The covers were lithographed on shore and the menu inside printed on a press on board. Covers depict romantic visions of buxom Hawaiian native girls, happy tourists on board elegant yachts, groups of pretty girls relaxing on deck, gorgeous New Zealand native women, beautiful blonde couples as passengers, koala bears up trees, racing Hawaiian skiffs, and happy island natives in bright cheerful villages.
Among the artist’s most commissioned for the latter, happy island villagers, we find Eugene Savage. Born in Covington Indiana in 1883, he became a respectable professor at Yale, teaching mural painting, by 1947. He painted large-scale murals at Yale, Columbia, Purdue, the Post Office building in Washington DC, the Elks National Vet’s Memorial in Chicago, the Court of Appeals in Albany, NY and the Great Hall murals for the 1936 Centennial Exposition in Dallas, TX.
Commissioned Menu Covers
In 1938, the Matson Shipping line also commissioned Savage to paint murals for cruise ships traveling to Hawaii. Savage studied the native customs of the Hawaiians in a Romantic Past Life. When war threatened the US enlisted vessels for troop transportation so Matson Shipping put the murals into storage.
In 1948 a Matson executive thought to reproduce Savage’s murals on a series of lithographed menu covers. The lithographs won all kinds of awards, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts and a place in the Smithsonian. D.A.’s watercolor comes from this tradition, a watercolor commissioned for a menu cover.
I saw a 1935 illustrated menu from the legendary Normandie ship. It offered twelve courses, with eight to ten options for each course, including five choices of ice cream, six cuts of ham and three styles of consommé. Stunning! On the last cruise I took, to Belize, I bargained for a real glass wine glass. Instead of dressing for dinner at a set time, we threw on a towel and raided a 24-hour buffet. On my honeymoon cruise, in the prehistoric Ice Age, they assigned us a dining table with the same group. I made friends with a mixed marriage couple; him a NY Jew and her a NY Catholic. I still have the menu they signed for me.
What do these menus sell for?
A Titanic menu, regrettably hard to find, sold last year at auction for $102,508. The average price for a Savage Hawaiian themed menu is $15. But, if you have, like D.A., the original artwork for a reproduced menu, you are lucky indeed. Savage’s “Seaside Market” 42×42″ sold in 2009 for $24k. D.A.’s watercolor, created by Hans Bauer (1883-1967) for a menu cover, doesn’t compare to a Savage original. I estimate the value at $500.
D.A. can research other collections of maritime collections at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, VA. Grace Kelly crossed the Atlantic as a first class passenger on the SS Constitution to marry Prince Rainier in 1956. Menu covers illustrate the glamour of the era, when Princess Grace dined on broiled shad roe with lemon butter for lunch and medallion de foie gras de Strasbourg for dinner.