BETTY WHITE VERY RARE VINTAGE 1960 WALLACE SEAWELL MIDCENTURY GLAMOUR PHOTOGRAPH

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

BETTY WHITE VERY RARE VINTAGE 1960 WALLACE SEAWELL MIDCENTURY GLAMOUR PHOTOGRAPH:
$34.00

Thanks to all our buyers! We are honored to be your one-stop, 5-star source for vintage pin up, pulp magazines, original illustration art, decorative collectibles and ephemera with a wide and always changed assortment of antique and vintage items from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Mid-Century Modern eras. All items are 100% guaranteed to be original, vintage, and as described. Please feel free to contact us with any and all questions about the items and our policies and please take a moment to peruse our other great items. All sell !ITEM: You are offerding on a remarkable c. 1960 photograph of enduring Hollywood icon and comedienne Betty White in a glamorous midcentury portrait by renowned celebrity portraitist Wallace Seawell. A gorgeous image that has been blind stamped by the photographer and comes from his personal collection, this photo dates to Seawell\'s tenure at the Paul A. Hesse Studios. In all of our years selling photographs, this is our first chance to offer an example from this era of Ms. White\'s career, which should give some sense of how scarce these images are. A fantastic artifact of a Hollywood treasure!Measures 8\" x 10\" with margins on glossy, single weight paper stock. Photographer\'s blind stamp in the lower, right corner. Photographer\'s ink stamp on verso.We have recently acquired an exquisite collection of Golden Age of Hollywood photographs and are happy to combine multiple wins at no additional cost. Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from GrapefruitMoonGallery.CONDITION:This original gelatin silver photograph is in fine+ condition with minimal handling wear. A sensational midcentury portrait!***************Wallace Seawell
Obituary By: Randy KennedyWallace Seawell, a celebrity photographer whose West Hollywood home was for decades one of the country’s most productive glamour factories, turning out thousands of portraits of movie stars, singers, presidents, kings and Gabor sisters (all three), died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 90.Mr. Seawell’s subjects, who sat for him in the pre-paparazzi days, when photographers tried to make stars look their best, included almost everyone who was someone in movies and music from the 1940s through the 1980s: Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Sophia Loren, Nat King Cole, Janet Leigh, Jayne Mansfield, Audrey Hepburn, Tony Curtis, Paul Newman, Ava Gardner, Joan Collins and Diana Ross.President Lyndon B. Johnson, while in the White House, came to Mr. Seawell’s house to be photographed, as did the Shah of Iran, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Earlier in his career he was under a personal contract to Howard Hughes at RKO Pictures where he had an office adjoining Hughes’s.Mr. Seawell, who liked to be called just Seawell, made highly stylized portraits for many of the Hollywood celebrity magazines, like Photoplay and Screen Gems. He also took photographs for several studios and celebrity agencies.In interviews, he often sounded as star-struck as the fans for whom his photographs were intended. “It was the greatest time to be in Hollywood,” he said of his career, in an interview in 2000. “You could really get to know the stars then. They threw big parties in their homes, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to most of them.”Wallace Lacy Seawell was born Sept. 16, 1916, in Atlanta. When he was 7 his family moved to Sarasota, Fla., where teachers noticed his artistic talent. His early ambition was to be a painter, but he soon took up a camera and was accepted into a highly competitive photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He later was a set designer and fashion photographer in New York.After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job — one that would last 20 years — with Paul A. Hesse, then a leading commercial photographer on the West Coast. When Mr. Hesse retired, Mr. Seawell started his own business in his antique-filled home. He is survived by several nieces and nephews.Besides studio work, Mr. Seawell also took his camera on the road, accompanying the Harlem Globetrotters on three around-the-world tours and taking promotional photographs at far-flung tourist spots for Braniff, Pan Am and Scandinavian Airlines. He once served as the official photographer for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.For many years, Mr. Seawell shared his home with the actress Carol Channing and her husband and manager, Charles Lowe. In the late 1990s, he became enmeshed in their highly public divorce battle when Ms. Channing accused her husband of spending all his money on Mr. Seawell. Both men denied that this was the case. Mr. Seawell noted that he already had plenty of money.He described his success as a result of enthusiasm, something not especially hard to come by when taking pictures of Sophia Loren. “She was divine to work with,” he said in an interview. “The aura of the person excites you, and you’ve got to be excited or you won’t do a good job.”— Obituary By: Randy Kennedy c/o The New York Times***************Betty WhiteActress Betty White got her start in local Los Angeles television as the \"telephone girl\" for video emcee Al Jarvis. By early 1950 she was one of the stars of the daily, five-hour series Hollywood on Television. One of the highlights of this program was a husband and wife sketch titled \"Life With Elizabeth,\" which when committed to film and syndicated nationally in 1953 became White\'s first starring TV sitcom. She went on to headline her own network variety series in 1954, then co-starred with Bill Williams in the weekly TV domestic comedy Date With the Angels (1957), which without Williams was retitled The Betty White Show in early 1958. For the next 15 years she made guest appearances on various variety and quiz show efforts, and toured the straw-hat theatrical circuit in such plays as Critics Choice and Who Was That Lady, often appearing opposite her husband, TV personality Allen Ludden. Two years after hosting the 1971 syndicated informational series The Pet Set, she guest-starred as liofferinous \"Happy Homemaker\" Sue Ann Nivens on the fourth season opener of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This Emmy-winning episode led to White being cast as an MTM regular; she remained with the series until its final episode in 1977. She then starred on her own short-lived sitcom (again titled The Betty White Show) before returning to the guest-star circuit. In 1985, she joined the cast of TV\'s The Golden Girls as middle-aged grief counselor Rose Nyland. This top-rated program lasted seven seasons before metamorphosing into the rather less successful Golden Palace (1992). White was a regular on the 1995 series Maybe This Time, and in 1997 she won an Emmy for her one-shot appearance on The John Laroquette Show. She was in the films Hard Rain and The Story of Us, as well as Lake Placid. In 2003 she was cast in Bringing Down the House, and in 2008 provided a voice for the American version of Ponyo.White developed a new generation in fans when she became the subject of a successful online campaign to get her to host Saturday Night Live - which she did in 2010, along with winning the SAG award for Life time Achievement. The year before, she had a part in the hit Sandra Bullock vehicle The Proposal. She also became the star of year another successful TV show when she was cast in the female-centric sitcom Hot in Cleveland. She lent her voice to the 2012 adaptation of The Lorax.— All Movie Biography By: Hal Erickson