The House of the Seven Gables

While enrolled in an illustration course at Cooper Union in 1948, Alex Katz (born 1927) created nine ink drawings to accompany Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic romance, The House of the Seven Gables. Published a century earlier, in 1851, Hawthorne’s classic novel is a solemn study of greed, guilt and atonement under the Puritan moral code of 19th-century New England, inspired by the curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a condemned woman during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.