Coinciding With Meryl Streep Movie Release, Florence Foster Jenkins Artifacts For Sale

For Immediate Release
Contact: Gabriel Boyers 1-617-308-4019, schubertiademusic@gmail.com

BOSTON, MA: “Florence Foster Jenkins,” starring Meryl Streep as the New York socialite and famously awful singer and Hugh Grant as her loyal and protective husband, will be released in the US on August 11. Coinciding with the film’s opening night, Boston-based dealer in music-related manuscripts and collectibles Schubertiade Music & Arts will be releasing a special Florence Foster Jenkins catalogue of rare artifacts from the famed diva.

Signed photographs from “Lady Florence” show Jenkins in all her glory, surrounded by flowers at the piano and dressed in one of her fabulous costumes. Original programs and flyers from her famous 1944 Carnegie Hall recital and earlier private performances highlight her amusing selection of repertoire, and unpublished Margaret Bourke-White photographs from a 1937 party at her apartment show her surrounded by younger artists.

The real-life actor St. Clair Bayfield, played by Hugh Grant, is represented in the collection in a signed photograph and autograph letter. Also for sale is a rare original record of Jenkins, humorously inscribed and given as a gift by the American composer Samuel Barber. An original souvenir program from the Italian National Fascist Militia Band’s 1934 American tour, sponsored by Jenkins, highlights her questionable taste as a patron of the arts, completing the collection.

“Jenkins is a unique figure in music, a singer famous for her self-delusion and beloved precisely because she was so terrible,” says Schubertiade owner Gabriel Boyers. “Seeing her signed photographs and the original programs she presented really conveys the humor and pathos of her story.”

Autograph material and memorabilia from Florence Foster Jenkins is extremely rare and highly sought-after. No other group of such material has ever been offered for sale.

Schubertiade Music & Arts, established in 2006, specializes in all fields of the performing and visual arts and has an international clientele of both private and institutional collectors of original printed and manuscript material, dating from the 15th to the 21st centuries. The company delights in dealing with both the lofty and the funky, from esoteric and scholarly tomes to playful memorabilia, and from Monteverdi, Handel, Beethoven, and Ligeti to The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and John Coltrane.