Lot # : 72 - James Dexter Havens Signed Woodblock Print

Vintage James Dexter Havens Signed Woodblock Print #3 of 30. This James Havens Print is Pencil Signed and it is in Excellent Condition as pictured. It measures 4 1/4" by 5 1/4" by sight and is framed to 11 1/2" by 13 1/2". Pencil Signed at bottom of print. James Dexter Havens was born in January 13, 1900 in Rochester, New York and had a fairly unremarkable childhood until he was fourteen, at which time he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Doctors gave him only two years to live, but he clung to life for the next eight years, albeit bedridden much of the time. In order to combat boredom, he turned to drawing. In the early 1920s, Attorney James S. Havens—the artist's father—who had already served as a U.S. Representative to Congress (1910-11) and was head of its legal department of the Eastman Kodak Co.—was searching for something to help his desperately ill son. Through his high offices at Kodak, he rubbed shoulders and played golf with a great many men in all sorts of fields. Among these men was Professor JJR Macleod, who headed the lab at the University of Toronto where Frederick Banting and Charles Best were doing the first research on insulin in 1921-22. Through the intervention of Professor Macleod, young Jim Havens, became the first American to undergo insulin therapy. By the time he received treatment, he weighed less than 74 pounds at the age of twenty-two. Initially, the insulin—administered by Dr. John R. Williams of Rochester—was ineffective and it was only after Frederick Banting traveled to Rochester and injected the young man himself that the diabetes was finally brought under control. In fact, when Banting finished injecting Havens, the young man enjoyed the first full meal he'd had in many years. Havens later trained at the University of Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and with Thomas Fogarty for etching, Troy Kinney, Charles Woodbury at Ogunquit, Maine and John E. Costigan. Self taught as a printmaker, Havens made his first prints, mainly in the form of bookplates and greeting cards, in the late 1920s. On July 18, 1927, he married Gladys (Corland) Havens and together, they had a son, James C., and a daughter, Bettina "Tina" Havens (Letcher), who eventually married a professor of physics at the University of Rhode Island. By the mid-1930s, Havens was a fairly accomplished printmaker, usually working in color, creating both linoleum cuts and woodcuts. During this period, he built a home/studio for himself and his family in Fairport, New York, five miles southeast of Rochester. See pictures for complete condition and description. We will always combine the shipping on multiple item purchases in the same auction. We will only combine shipping where feasible.