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blue hardcover 4to ~ 4º (quarto ~ 10"x8"). large "coffee table" book. dustwrapper in protective brodart book jacket cover. vg cond. binding square & tight. front cover has 1cm spot. edges clean. inside covers have old glue residue & scratches ( old dustwrapper cover was glued down), erasure spot with perforation on front flyleaf, otherwise contents free of markings. inner hinges reinforced with brodart silk hinge tape. dustwrapper in vg+ cond. minor soiling & wrinkling, not torn or price clipped (no price listed). nice vintage copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first printing (nap) of this new edition. 79p. 22 full color plates. 7 supplementary plates. 6 pages of b&w photo illustrations. 5 appendices. books old & new (bibliography). biography. english literature. poetry. art history. art books. pre~raphaelite brotherhood~ Max Beerbohm was not only an incomparable writer but was also without equal as a caricaturist, one whom Edmund Wilson called "the greatest caricaturist of the kind~that is, portrayer of personalities~in the history of art." Although most of Beerbohm's caricatures were of his contemporaries, some of his best work relates to the years just before his own. For him the shining light of the period was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he delighted in drawing Rossetti together with the other PreRaphaelites and the eccentric artists, writers, models, and mistresses that surrounded him: Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Ruskin, William Morris, Burne~Jones, Swinburne, Meredith, Tennyson, Browning, Whistler, Carlyle, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and others. Max's twenty~three watercolor drawings on these subjects, published in 1922, remain his most famous caricatures. When the book first appeared, The Times commented: "Each drawing is worth a whole volume of sermons on ideals in art and life,"and the New York Times announced, "Here is the final criticism of the Pre~Raphaelite Brotherhood." According to one of Rossetti's nieces, "No living person within the PreRaphaelite circle has given so accurate a picture of its physical and spiritual composition." In this new edition of Rossetti and His Circle, John Hall provides an urbane and witty introduction, supplying quotations from the early PreRaphaelite literature, anecdotes, and biographical material to help explain the genesis of the book. The drawings themselves, newly reproduced from the originals, are further supplemented with additional caricatures of related subjects, old photographs from which Beerbohm worked, and related short prose pieces by Beerbohm, some from his unfinished and unpublished novel about the Pre~Raphaelites. The book presents Max's Rossetti drawings more vividly than they have ever been seen before, not only preserving but enhancing Beerbohm's masterpiece of comic art.
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