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Vintage matte-finish 6.75 x 8.25 photo of Albert Einstein hard at work in his study, with bookshelves in the background and papers spread across his desk, signed and inscribed in the lower border in fountain pen, "Der lieben Otto Nathan [To dear Otto Nathan], A. Einstein, 50.” In very good to fine condition, with two faint vertical bends, a tiny corner crease, and a longer diagonal crease to the blank right side of the bottom border. Encapsulated in a PSA/DNA authentication holder.
Like Einstein, economist Otto Nathan fled Nazi Germany and took a position on the faculty at Princeton University, where his friendship with the genius began. Nathan would serve as the sole executor of Einstein's estate after the scientist's death in April 1955, and was designated by Einstein as co-trustee of his literary estate (along with Einstein's secretary Helen Dukas). After Einstein's death, Nathan and Dukas spent 25 years organizing his papers and collecting supplementary material from around the world. They planned for all of Einstein's papers—personal and scientific—to eventually be published, and in 1971 Princeton University Press undertook the massive publishing effort.
The photographer of this portrait was likely Hermann Landshoff, also a German-Jewish émigré who settled in the United States in the 1930s. He visited Einstein several times in the 1940s and early 1950s, capturing several images of the genius in quiet moments at his home or Princeton study.
From the estate of Margaret Sanders Adams, the daughter of KFC founder Col. Harland Sanders; notably, she received several photographs from Einstein's executor Otto Nathan to use as reference material for her creation of a bust of Einstein.
Sanders documents her longstanding interest in Albert Einstein, her creation of Einstein's bust, her friendship with Otto Nathan, and his delivery of her 'open letter' to Einstein in her memoir, The Colonel's Secret: Eleven Herbs and a Spicy Daughter (pp. 186-239), published in 1996.
