Born in 1938, Richard Merkin was a Brooklyn-born painter and illustrator who earned his Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1963.  He taught at RISD for 42 years while living in New York, commuting every week to teach painting and drawing.  Among his more notable students were Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, and actor/comedian Martin Mull. Merkin's image was one of the many faces featured on the cover of the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His work is represented in the permanent collections at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Smithsonian Institution.

In 1986, Merkin became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and by 1988 was an illustrator for Harper's, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New Yorker. He produced nearly 300 illustrations for The New Yorker. Merkin's love of baseball was well-known; he was the illustrator of the book Leagues Apart: The Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues.  New Yorker editor Chris Curry wrote of Merkin after his 2009 passing, "He was a life force and he brought a smile to all who knew him. I was Richard's editor, and when he phoned the office, the whole department knew it: you could actually hear his big, wonderful voice across the room."

For the October 4, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, Merkin produced this spectacular - and large - work to illustrate the exhibit of Jefferson Burdick's baseball card collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The illustration itself appeared on page 34, but despite taking up a large percentage of the page, one could not tell that the piece is as large as it is, matted and framed to a finished size of approximately 41" x 50". A wonderful piece for a hobbyist, the pastel-on-paper illustration depicts Jefferson Burdick and the famed T206 Honus Wagner card, along with a smattering of familiar 1933 Goudey cards in the foreground.  Intensely colorful, the dynamic piece is accompanied by the page of the New Yorker where it originally appeared.

Merkin was, of course, a legendary collector, primarily of items from his beloved decades of the 1920s through the 1940s.  His collection of Cuban and Negro League cards and memorabilia was World Class, and elements of it are now part of many advanced collections.  A wonderful, whimsical piece that bridges the gap between our hobby and art perfectly: a beautiful painting created by a well-known artist who was also a card collector.