Auction Highlights: Tennis & Sports Posters: Collection of the Schwartz Family & Tennis Corporation of America

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, *E. & A. – Mele – & Ci. Napoli*, billboard, 1907. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.

Swann’s May 9 poster auction offers the world’s most preeminent private tennis and sport collection. With more than 100 scarce and desirable tennis posters coming to auction, this will be the largest collection of tennis posters ever to hit the market, in addition to other sporting images.

This singular collection, spanning the 1890s through the 1950s, is the result of a family passion for tennis, fitness and art. The Schwartz family used posters to decorate their well-known clubs, resulting in an assemblage of rare and exciting images from all over the world.

Tennis poster enthusiasts will delight in seeing favorites, but they will have the unparalleled opportunity to view and acquire images that don’t appear in the pages of the prominent books written about tennis posters. Rarities include over half a dozen Wimbledon posters designed for the London Underground in the 1930s, and Roger Broders’s Monte Carlo, alongside works by Alfred Runge, Eduard Stiefel, Leon Dupin, Hans Rudi Erdt, and Frank Newbould.