“FROM ERNEST HEMINGWAY, SUN VALLEY, IDAHO”: EXCEPTIONAL LARGE VINTAGE GELATIN SILVER PRINT OF HEMINGWAY, TAKEN IN SUN VALLEY BY FAMED PHOTOGRAPHER CAPA IN OCTOBER 1940, FRAMED WITH HEMINGWAY’S INSCRIPTION DISPLAYED BELOW THE PRINT

(CAPA, Robert) HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Photograph. WITH: Autograph note signed. Sun Valley, Idaho: (Life), [1940]. Vintage gelatin silver print (9-1/2 by 12-inches), Capa/Life magazine inkstamp on print verso, partial leaf in manuscript (1-1/4 by 3-1/2 inches) centered below print, each window-matted, together framed (total measures 13-1/2 by 18-3/4 inches). $6500.

Scarce 9-1/2 by 12-inch vintage gelatin print of Hemingway from a wonderful photograph by his friend, famed photographer Robert Capa, taken in Sun Valley, Idaho in the fall of 1940, with Hemingway’s inscription on a partial leaf inscribed by him, “From Ernest Hemingway, Sun Valley, Idaho,” handsomely framed together.

This wonderful 9-1/2 by 12-inch vintage gelatin silver print of Hemingway, framed with his inscription, is from a photograph by renowned war photographer Robert Capa. Capa took the photograph in October 1940, when the two men were joined by Hemingway’s three sons and future wife, writer Martha Gellhorn, at Sun Valley Lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho. Hemingway, Capa and Gellhorn had become close friends during the Spanish Civil War, where Hemingway’s “dispatches provide a vivid accuracy of how the war was fought— and his experience would later inform his writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Putnam, Prologue Magazine). That novel, published the same month as this stay in Sun Valley, earned immediate praise as “one of the major novels in American literature” (New York Times). In a 2008 interview, Hemingway’s son Patrick recalled that it was on this trip that Hemingway’s nickname of Papa “was started by Capa… [who] was sent out to do a shoot on Hemingway sort of relaxing after coming back from the Spanish Civil War in Sun Valley. And all of Hemingway’s children were there, my half brother, Jack, and my full brother, Gregory. The three of us were all there, and we kept calling him papa because he never wanted to be called dad. And so Capa said, is it all right if I call you papa, too? And that’s when it started” (NPR). During their time in Sun Valley, Hemingway and company enjoyed several hunting and road trips, and Hemingway and Gellhorn’s marriage on November 21 would “figure in a two-part photo essay in Life by their friend Robert Capa. The second part was a series of quotations from For Whom the Bell Tolls accompanied by Capa’s [Spanish] Civil War photographs” (Mellow, 522). This exceptionally scarce vintage print of Hemingway shows the writer standing at road side next to a parked vehicle. His hair touseled by the wind and squinting against the sun, Hemingway raises a hand toward the camera in what appears to be an offer of food. Capa and Hemingway later had a falling out at the break-up of Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn, whose novella Till Death Do Us Part (1958) speaks to her relationship with Hemingway and friendship with Capa. Photographs from this trip were included in Capa’s book, Slightly out of Focus (1947), and his photographs of Hemingway were also featured in Life’s 1961 issue paying tribute to the writer shortly after his tragic suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. Inkstamp stating “Life Photo by Robert Capa” on print verso, visible in windowed cut-out on frame verso. Two small framer’s labels to frame verso.

Inscription bold and clean. A fine framed print.