She wasn't one for self-portraits. Not counting Jean Louise (Scout) Finch, the only picture Harper Lee is known to have made of herself is one she literally drew: a pen-and-ink sketch in which she is asleep. A line of “Z”s connects Lee, curled up on a bed, to a dream bubble that contains her two literary agents—a married couple, who are seen working outside in a garden and hanging laundry on the line, while a cigarette and a cup of coffee wait on a windowsill (presumably for Lee, a fierce devotee of both). A charming image, it lives in obscurity among contracts, clippings, letters, telegrams, and royalty statements that make up the rest of the literary agency's archives at Columbia University. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was the only one of its kind.
In fact, though, Harper Lee loved to draw, and a trove of her visual art will soon be sold at an auction by Bonhams. The first of its kind on the market, the collection includes thirteen ink drawings, one pencil drawing, and an acrylic portrait. Nine of the images are caricatures that Lee created and captioned during college—most likely during a Shakespeare class that she took, because they include a series of his characters. King Lear stands on the cliffs of Dover, with a price tag (“$3.98”) hanging from his cloak, like an Elizabethan Minnie Pearl; Julius Caesar smokes a pipe while “contemplating the infinite”; Othello towers over an angel and a devil, apparently displaced from his scrawny shoulders; Cassius drips dry outside the Roman baths, where “you must have a ticket before you bathe”; and Malvolio, “the impatient one,” crosses his legs while “waiting to go to the jakes” (nowadays more commonly known as the john).
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