Legacy

The collection of Nikola Tesla’s art objects, which is not broad in scope, is made up of artistic items which were mostly gifts from admirers, design drawings and a few cartoons.

Two framed watercolors, depicting sailing ships and boats with fisher-men sailing through calm water near the shore, over which stretches a broad sky, are probably the only paintings which Tesla looked at on the wall of his room. These watercolors are the work of an unknown artist, probably European, and are signed “AlboT”.

The most frequent subject in this collection is Tesla’s portrait. These were done by Ivan Benković, Jovan Barać, Diaz Buitrago and an un-known artist who named his study of Tesla’s face “Tesla’s angel”.

There are also four cartoons in this collection. These are the work of three well-known American cartoonists and very interesting figures from the beginning of the twentieth century. They are Edwin Marcus – one of the best known political cartoonists of the first half of the twentieth centu-ry, George Benjamin Luks – cartoonist, portraitist and painter, and Homer Davenport, the best paid political cartoonist, a lover of Arabian horses and a man who rubbed shoulders with the wealthiest people in America.

The largest part of this collection comprises seven colored sketches of domestic animals and a somewhat abstract landscape drawn by May Klein. These drawings were never framed and were kept together with letters from May to Tesla.