Within the clamshell case, everything was wrapped in sheets of loose tissue paper, making the whole thing a bit cumbersome to unpack and impossible to enjoy all spread out. The result was that most folks extracted and hung the prints they liked, gave away or sold the rest, and tossed the wrappings, so that few complete sets survive.
A second Frost portfolio, A Day’s Shooting, was published by Scribner’s in 1903. The handsome box with an image of a hunter and a setter on the cover, contains six hand-colored lithographs, published as three pairs of related prints. As always, each print tells a story, sometimes with humor. The set most popular with waterfowlers is certainly Good Luck and Bad Luck, while wingshooters go for the two upland subjects, Ordered Off and Gun Shy. Interestingly, the two least popular prints, both sentimental in tone, Smoking Him Out and We’ve Got Him, featuring a grandpa and grandson hunting for the pot, are now the hardest to find because they were so often removed from the collection.
After Frost’s death, the Derrydale Press in 1933 published a final, much appreciated limited edition of 200 copies on imported rag paper, from four plates hand-colored by A.B.’s surviving son, artist John Frost (1890–1937); the plates were destroyed after publication. The four 13 x 19¼ -inch prints are October Woodcock Shooting, Grouse Shooting in the Rhododendrons, Chance Shot While Setting Out Decoys, and Coming Ashore, whose details, as with all of Frost’s works, from the waterfowlers’ hats to their boots, ring true to critical-eyed sportsmen.
Frost dabbled several times in the dream of tossing away his lucrative but grueling career as an illustrator for fine art painting. After a pilgrimage to London in 1877 to check out their crop of top illustrative artists, including Charles Keene, of Punch, and caricaturists George and Robert Cruikshank, Frost tasked himself with filling in the gaps in his art education. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study draftsmanship and anatomy with Thomas Eakins. Later, classes with William Merritt Chase helped loosen his iron grip and tight illustrator’s fist.
In 1906 Frost took his talented young sons to live in Paris in order for them all to study art at the Académie Julian. But when both boys contracted tuberculosis, which required three years in an expensive sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, A.B. threw in the towel on fine art and returned to the grind of illustration.
Brooke Chilvers writes, “In my childhood, there were still remnants of Frost’s winter scrub with good gamebird cover, and waves of saltmarsh and migrating shorebirds. But the snipe he recounts shooting on Long Island are long gone and the hunting closed.”
