“THE DOCTOR IS REAL IN”: OUTSTANDING LARGE, ORIGINAL SKETCH OF LUCY AT HER PSYCHIATRY STAND, SIGNED BY CHARLES SCHULZ
SCHULZ, Charles M. Original sketch signed (“The Doctor is Real In”). No place: circa 1965. One folio leaf of art paper (11 by 15 inches), sketch on recto only, matted and framed; entire piece measures 16 by 19 inches.
Excellent original sketch depicting Lucy waiting for patients at her homemade “Psychiatric Help” stand, the front of which proudly reads, “The Doctor is Real In,” boldly signed vertically by Schulz in the right margin, framed.
Some children operate homemade lemonade stands; Lucy Van Pelt, of Charles Schulz’s beloved “Peanuts” gang, reflects the introspective anxiety of the mid-20th century by operating a homemade psychiatry stand. Presumably in a self-conscious 1960s attempt to show she is relevant and “with it,” Lucy has altered her stand’s front panel to read, “The Doctor is Real In” (as it does—for at least some of the time—in the 1965 animated special, A Charlie Brown Christmas). More than an amusing visual gag, Lucy’s psychiatric help desk visually summarizes much of the early appeal of Schulz’s classic comic strip. “Peanuts spoke directly to a student generation absorbed in irony and tension, paradox and ambiguity. When Charlie Brown first confessed, ‘I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel,’ he spoke for Eisenhower’s America, especially for that generation of solemn, cynical college students—the last to grow up, as Schulz and his contemporaries had, without television, who read Charlie Brown’s utterances as existential statements about the human condition” (Michaelis, 269).
A few faint creases to lower right corner. An excellent and iconic piece of American popular culture, beautifully framed.