Albert Zuckerman: a giant of the publishing world with a love of legends and fairy tales

As a literary agent, Albert Zuckerman was renowned for his exacting approach. Writers would often be put through multiple rounds of revisions before he recommended their books to a publisher. Assistants of his, meanwhile, were tasked with penning a novel of their own, so they could experience the writing process first-hand.

Zuckerman was similarly steadfast in putting together his art collection, highlights of which feature across two auctions at Christie’s in London during Classic Week: the Old Masters Evening Sale on 30 June 2026 and the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture on 1 July.

Not by coincidence, several of the works have literary subjects, derived from a range of sources, from Shakespeare to the Brothers Grimm. More specifically, the Albert Zuckerman Collection offers escape into a dreamworld of fairies and fairy tales, sirens, elves and fauns. That escape comes courtesy of numerous artists from 19th-century England and France (the time and places where most of the works coming to auction were made).

The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Zuckerman was born in the New York borough of the Bronx in 1931. His father owned a hat-making shop in Manhattan. As a young man, Albert served in the navy and studied at both Princeton University and the Yale School of Drama, earning a PhD at the latter with a dissertation on Hamlet.

After a stint in academia, he founded the literary agency Writers House in the mid-1970s. Success came fast, with Zuckerman serving — as he himself put it — as a ‘midwife’ who helped authors bring their creations into the world. In many cases, these creations became bestsellers. Ken Follett, Michael Lewis and Stephen Hawking were among the writers he represented.

In 1994, he shared his professional wisdom with the publication of a book of his own: Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Dan Brown was an avid early reader and credits its tips for the success of his debut novel, Digital Fortress. ‘In many ways [that book] changed my life,’ Brown has said.

Zuckerman lived in a 19th-century brownstone house in Chelsea. The property had become dilapidated by the time he bought it in 1985, prompting a loving restoration that included period plasterwork, parquet floors and William Morris wallpaper.

In keeping with the date and style of the house, Zuckerman soon began to collect 19th-century art to display in it. His first purchase was James Clarke Hook’s depiction of a conversation between Juliet and her nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5. Other Shakespearean works — by the likes of Daniel Maclise and Gustave Doré — followed.

Over the decades, the collection evolved, with Zuckerman showing a fondness for scenes of imaginary beings and realms. In the 2000s and early 2010s, he increasingly acquired Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist pictures, the highlight being John Melhuish Strudwick’s ‘Thy Music, faintly falling, dies away, Thy dear eyes dream that Love will live for aye’ (more on which below).

Zuckerman passed away in March 2026, aged 94. His beloved art collection comes to auction following the sale of his Tiffany Studios lamps and furnishings at Christie’s in New York.

Below, we single out five upcoming lots: works representative of a collection that, for Zuckerman, was the stuff of dreams.

John Melhuish Strudwick, ‘Thy Music, faintly falling, dies away, Thy dear eyes dream that Love will live for aye’

This painting of an otherworldly female musician is a perfect example of the Aestheticist belief in art for art’s sake. Which is to say, its creator — John Melhuish Strudwick — was less interested in pictures that told stories or taught lessons than ones that simply looked beautiful.

Having trained in the studios of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (one of whose works is offered in the collection) and Edward Burne-Jones in the 1870s, Strudwick painted Thy Music… at the height of his career, two decades later. From the rich fabrics of the young musician’s dress, to the tempera-like quality of the paint surface, the work reveals the distinct influence of Botticelli, whose art was being actively acquired by London’s National Gallery as Strudwick made his name.

Strudwick and other Pre-Raphaelite painters frequently adopted musical subjects — The Love Song by Burne-Jones being a fine example. In the case of Thy Music…, the subject is playing a stringed instrument, probably a psaltery, the inlay on which is meticulously executed.

The painting’s first owner was the Liverpool shipping magnate William Imrie, one of the original partners in the White Star Line, the company that went on to launch the Titanic.

Robert Huskisson, Titania’s Elves Robbing the Squirrel’s Nest — Midsummer Night’s Dream

Fairy painting was a genre that began in Britain in the late 18th century with artists such as William Blake and Henry Fuseli. It reached the peak of its popularity in the Victorian era, Shakespeare’s plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest providing the most frequently adapted source material.

Robert Huskisson was a short-lived painter who specialised in this genre. He died in his early forties, and the Albert Zuckerman Collection contains what is thought to be the final work he exhibited at the Royal Academy. It takes inspiration from a passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream after Titania, the queen of the fairies, has taken a potion that makes her her fall in love with the ass-headed Bottom.

She promises to have a large supply of nuts fetched for him, and Huskisson’s scene (not actually part of the play) imagines the fulfilment of that promise. It captures the mirth of Titania’s elves at the success of their plundering expedition at a squirrel’s expense. Titania asleep..., another work by Huskisson inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is also offered in the sale.

Studio of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, attributed to Henry Teffry Dunn, Lady Lilith

According to Talmudic legend, Adam had a wife before Eve. Called Lilith, she fascinated the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti — and inspired one of his most famous pictures. Today part of the collection of the Delaware Art Museum, Lady Lilith depicts a sultry femme fatale who gazes at a mirror as she combs her luxuriant auburn hair.

Rossetti used his mistress and housekeeper, Fanny Cornforth, as a model for the work — which he sold to the Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland upon its completion in 1868. Not entirely happy with it, however, Leyland returned the painting to the artist a few years later, the major resulting change being the replacement of Cornforth’s face with that of another model.

In the process, some of the painting’s intimacy was lost — intimacy that is evident in a chalk drawing in the Albert Zuckermann Collection, probably by Rossetti’s studio assistant, Henry Treffry Dunn. The precise purpose and date of the drawing aren’t known. However, the sitter’s features are certainly those of Cornforth, and it was likely executed before the original painting was finished.

Rossetti described Dunn as ‘the best of fellows and my guardian angel’. With this drawing, Dunn provides a fascinating early glimpse of a celebrated picture, before it changed forever.

Walter Crane, Ensigns of Spring

A man of many talents, Walter Crane worked as a ceramicist, a painter, a wallpaper designer and a children’s book illustrator. His fame today rests chiefly on the last of those roles. The best thing about illustrating for children, he said, ‘is that the imagination may be let loose and roam freely… sure of being followed by that ever-living sense of wonder and romance in a child’s heart’.

Though intended for viewers of all ages, the painting Ensigns of Spring reveals much of the playfulness and whimsicality for which Crane is renowned. First exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society in London in 1894, it features three barefoot figures, each representing a flower emblematic of springtime: the iris, the lily and the bluebell.

The trio wear their flowers as hats, and also carry them like martyrs’ palms. The colours of the blooms, the dresses and the surrounding foliage all combine to create a subtle aesthetic harmony. Ensigns of Spring marks the sense of joy, vitality and renewal that we associate with the season’s arrival.

Albert Joseph Moore, Pansies

Like his friend James McNeill Whistler, Albert Joseph Moore defied contemporary Victorian expectations that a painting should be ‘read’ as one would a book — in terms of narrative or moral content. He insisted instead upon the exclusively aesthetic character of painting.

In Pansies, he depicts an anonymous female sitter resting on a sofa. Such is Moore’s attention to detail that when the work was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1875, the critic John Ruskin advised viewers to use a magnifying glass to study it.

The sofa covering was likely supplied by Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a textile merchant who furnished several artists’ studios in London — and who was then in the process of opening his now-famous eponymous store, Liberty, on Regent Street.

Also of note is the contrast between the semi-transparent gauze of the sitter’s apricot-coloured shift and the pale taupe satin encircling her waist and legs. Moore was fascinated by fabrics, reflecting a society-wide revival of interest in hand embroidery — a reaction to the prevalence of ostensibly inferior, machine-embroidered products.

‘Thy Music, faintly falling, dies away, Thy dear eyes dream that Love will live for aye’ is offered in the Old Masters Evening Sale on 30 June 2026. The remainder of The Albert Zuckermann Collection is offered in the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture on 1 July