A Huge Signed Photograph of Ernest Hemingway at his Famous Lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho, Inscribed to His Friend and Boxing Coach, George Brown;

A great rarity, a search of public sale records over the past forty years shows not even one Capa photograph signed by Hemingway having reached that marketplace

Ernest Hemingway and photographer Robert Capa became friends during the Spanish Civil War. They first met in Madrid in the Spring of 1937 when Hemingway was 37 and Capa was 23. Hemingway was working as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, for which he filed dispatches, and their friendship grew over the years. Capa’s photographs in Spain made him famous, and thereafter his work often appeared in the iconic pictorial magazine of the day, Life. Capa visited Hemingway numerous times at his home in Ketchum in Sun Valley, Idaho. In November 1940, Capa photographed a duck hunt with Hemingway for Life. In January 1941, Capa photographed the soon to be married Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn at his lodge in Sun Valley. Then in November of that year, Life published a pictorial essay by Capa of the hunting season at Sun Valley, with Capa in company of Hemingway and Gellhorn, Hemingway’s sons Jack, Patrick, and Gregory, actor Gary Cooper and his wife and their daughter Maria, movie director Howard Hawks and his fiance Nancy Gross and his son David, and Leland Hayward and wife Margaret Sullavan. Thus Hemingway’s lodge was quite a celebrity gathering point at the time, and worth cover stories in Life.

At the start of the 1940s, George Brown owned a gym in New York City where Hemingway worked out when he was in the town, and he and Brown became fast friends, Brown serving as his trainer and boxing coach, as well as supplier of sporting goods, ticket agent, and general factotum to Hemingway, Martha (and later wife Mary), while they were in Cuba.

An enormous 10 by 13 inch signed photograph of Hemingway standing on the deck of his lodge in Sun Valley, looking exactly as he did in photographs from 1940-1941, with the backstamp reading “Life photo by Robert Capa”, apparently taken on one of his three 1940 and 1941 visits to photograph Hemingway for Life. It is inscribed, “To George Brown, Best always, from his friend Ernest Hemingway.” It is entirely possible that the photograph appeared in Life at the time.

Capa stands with Yousuf Karsh as being the premier photographers of the era, and this is the first Capa photograph signed by Hemingway that we can ever recall seeing. A search of public sale records over the past forty years shows not even one having reached that marketplace. We are therefore particularly pleased to make this rarity available to our clients.