Henry Rox "Tommy Apple & Peggy Pear" Frontispiece Silver Gelatin Photo 1935/1940

Henry Rox (Heinz Rosenberg)
Vintage silver gelatin print
Negative 1935, print c. 1940
8.25 x 6.00 inches
Frontispiece for Tommy Apple and Peggy Pear (Jonathan Cape, London, 1936)
Estate stamp verso

This vintage silver gelatin print is the original frontispiece composition created by Henry Rox for Tommy Apple and Peggy Pear, the second collaboration between Rox and author James Laver and one of twenty-two original photographic tableaux produced for the volume. As frontispiece, the image serves as the visual threshold to the narrative.

In the composition, Tommy Apple and Peggy Pear peer cautiously over a rustic wooden fence, their fruit-formed hands gripping the rails as they confront an unseen landscape beyond. The fence functions simultaneously as structural device and psychological boundary. Rox’s sculptural discipline is evident in the measured spacing of the slats, the careful modeling of the fruit figures, and the precisely controlled lighting that creates a quiet, theatrical atmosphere. What appears whimsical reveals deliberate spatial engineering and tonal orchestration rooted in formal sculptural training.

Henry Rox was born Heinz Rosenberg in Berlin in 1899 into a prosperous Jewish family whose department store operated in one of Berlin’s principal commercial districts. The family’s success enabled him to study at the University of Berlin (1919–1923), the Charlottenburger Kunstgewerbeschule (1921–1925), and in Paris at the Académie Julian (1925–1927) and Académie Colarossi (1925–1928). Trained as a sculptor, he established a modern studio in Berlin and exhibited widely, including the Salon d’Automne (Paris), Juryfreie Kunstschau Berlin (1926), Freie Kunstschau Berlin (1929), Preussische Akademie der Künste (1930), Berliner Secession (1929–1932), and Gallery Paul Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim (Berlin, January 1933), as well as the Royal Academy of Arts (London) and the Royal Institute, Glasgow.

Returning to Berlin from Paris during the late 1920s, Rox worked within the experimental climate of the Weimar avant-garde and absorbed the influence of Dada. In 1933 he attended the Berliner Fotoschule, refining his technical understanding of photographic processes. It was in 1931 Berlin—prior to his exile—that Rox conceived and began developing what he termed “photo sculpture,” constructing figures and miniature environments from fruits, vegetables, and fabricated materials and photographing them as narrative tableaux. This synthesis of sculptural construction and photographic precision emerged directly from his European modernist training.

With the rise of National Socialism, Rox and his wife Lotte fled Germany in 1933, leaving behind his studio, possessions, and established career. His parents and other family members remained and were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. He never saw them again.

Relocating first to London, Rox adapted his photo-sculptural language to commercial and editorial commissions. His clients included Harrods, Guinness, De Bijenkorf, Vitrolite, Helene of London, Dole, Shell Oil, Macy’s, and CBS Radio, and his work appeared in publications such as Life, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Newsweek, Town & Country, and The New York Times Magazine.

Rox emigrated to the United States in 1938. In 1940 he produced an animated short as part of the MGM motion picture Strike Up the Band, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, bringing his constructed visual language to a national film audience. In 1939 he joined Mount Holyoke College as Lecturer in Sculpture, later becoming Professor of Art in 1954—the same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship—and Mary Lyon Professor of Art in 1963. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1964.

The “Tommy Apple” and “Peggy Pear” photographs were created during this period of exile and reinvention. Though presented as children’s illustrations, they are structurally disciplined, emotionally resonant constructions by an artist of rigorous European training who rebuilt his life and career in America. They stand as distinctive examples of twentieth-century constructed photographic illustration, merging sculptural craftsmanship, theatrical staging, and modern photographic sensibility.

Preserved within the artist’s estate since his death in 1967, this print forms part of a cohesive body of work that remained largely outside the marketplace for nearly six decades.