Delicatessen Maker (Plate C) is an etching, printed in sepia ink, from 1922 by American artist John William Winkler. It is pencil signed in the lower center margin. This etching was printed by the artist in Paris in 1923 on cream laid paper in an edition of 85 impressions. The reference is Library of Congress 10 and the dimensions are 9-1/4 x 8-1/8 inches platemark. This etching is accompanied with the original copper etching plate, which has an additional etched image for his Facades which he created about 1921 but did not publish until the early 1950s.
The Delicatessen Maker is considered one of Winkler’s most well-known images from his San Francisco's Chinatown series. He created an earlier version of the Delicatessen Maker in 1917 (illustrated on page 64 of Millman & Bohn’s Master of Line: John W. Winkler, an American Master) but the image is reversed with the figure placed on the left side of his shop.
Winkler was a lamplighter in San Francisco and his route took him through
San Francisco’s Chinese quarter where he discovered an exotic community.
According to Mary Millman and Dave Bohn, Winkler spent “every spare weekday
moment and every Saturday and Sunday there for about seven years.” He created
around seventy plates depicting the streets, architecture, inhabitants,
vendors, and moments of rest or leisure. In his etchings, he captured vignettes
of a lifestyle that was quickly vanishing and his subjects were always rendered
with dignity and respect.
John William Winkler, painter, printmaker, draftsman and craftsman, was born in Vienna, Austria on July 30, 1890. He departed Austria in 1910, changed his name to John William Winkler on a forged passport, and immigrated to the United States. Winkler claimed to have been born in the year 1894 but he most likely changed his birth year along with his name on his counterfeit passport. He enrolled in the Mark Hopkins Art Institute (later to become the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1912 and produced his first etching the following year. Winkler became a naturalized citizen in 1921.
Winkler was a member of and exhibited with the Chicago Society of Etchers, the California Society of Etchers, the Society of American Graphic Artists, the San Francisco Art Association, and the Printmakers Society of California. In 1920 he won his third Logan Prize from the Chicago Society of Etchers. Winkler was elected an Associate in the National Academy of Design in 1936 and to full Academician in 1951. One of the highest tributes he received was from his friend and fellow etcher, John Taylor Arms, who proclaimed Winkler to be the “master of line,” the “master of us all.”
In 1955, an exhibition of Winkler’s etchings was mounted at the Kunstzaal Binsbergen in Arnhem, Holland and, in 1974, a solo exhibition of his etchings, drawings, and carved boxes was displayed at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Brooklyn Museum presented John W. Winkler: Drawings, Prints, Boxes in 1979.
John William Winkler is represented in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Boston Public Library; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the San Francisco Public Library; the Clark Museum, Williamstown, Massachusetts; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
J.W. Winkler (known as “Winks”) died in El Cerrito, California in January 26, 1979.
