About this Item
First Edition. Quarto. Frontispiece, IX, [1] pages with 23 tipped-in plates (including the now famous Oscar Wilde - Caricature) with lettered tissue-guards. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket. The dustjacket very poor and fragmented but the Volume itself in excellent, firm condition. All colour-plates with tissue-guards in place and in wonderful condition. Excellent association-copy with the personal inscripton by Max Beerbohm to his friend Jack Lynch by incorporating the half-title: "Jack Lynch's copy of [Rossetti and his Circle] from Max - 1923". Rossetti and His Circle is a book of twenty-three caricatures by English caricaturist, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm. Published in 1922 by William Heinemann, the drawings were Beerbohm's humorous imaginings concerning the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, the period, as he put it, "just before oneself." The book is now considered one of Beerbohm's masterpieces. Beerbohm returned to England from his home in Rapallo in Italy so that he could study photographs of the subjects he depicted in his caricatures. During the winter of 1917 he rented a cottage in the English countryside near the home of his friend William Rothenstein so that he could work on his Rossetti drawings. Every day, carrying his portfolio of drawings with him, Beerbohm walked across the snow to visit Rothenstein. "No wonder Max was nervous of leaving his Rossetti caricatures in an empty cottage. What a remarkable reconstruction of a period!" Rothenstein later wrote. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had captured Beerbohm's imagination. "In London, in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, rich, drab, industrial complacency," he wrote, "Rossetti shone, for the men and women who knew him, with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog. And so he still shines for me." Beerbohm's caricatures include Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his sister Christina, John Ruskin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Holman Hunt, John Millais and George Meredith. In plate 22, Oscar Wilde, on his 1882 lecture tour in America, describes the delights of the Aesthetic Movement to a fascinated audience. This tour had been organised by Richard D'Oyly Carte to publicise the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience. Sir Hugh Walpole bequeathed Beerbohm's original watercolour artwork for Rossetti and His Circle to the Tate Collection in London in 1941. A special limited edition of 380 numbered copies bound in white cloth was also published in 1922. These were signed by Beerbohm. (Wikipedia) The tipped-in Colour-Plates in this publication are furnished with lettered tissue-guards. We are listing here each of the Illustrations and the text-accompanying them: I - "D.G.Rossetti, precociously manifesting, among the exiled Patriots who frequented his father's house in Charlotte Street, That Queer Indifference to Politics which marked him in his prime and his decline" II - "British Stock and Alien Inspiration" III - "Rossetti's Courtship - Chatham Place, 1850 - 1860" IV - "A Momentary Vision that once befell Young Millais" V - "The sole Remark Likely to have been made by Benjamin Jowett about the Mural Paintings at The Oxford Union: 'And what were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr.Rossetti ?'" VI - "Spring Cottage, Hampstead, 1860: 'Coventry Patmore very vehemantly preaches to the Rossettis that a Tea-Pot is not worshipful for its Form and Colour, but as a sublime Symbol of Domesticity'" VII: An Introduction - Miss Cornforth : "Oh, very pleased to meet Mr.Ruskin, I'm sure" VIII: "Blue China" [depicting Carlyle and Whistler] IX: "Woolner at Farringford, 1857" - Mrs.Tennyson: "You now, Mr.Woolner, I'm one of the most un-meddlesome of women; but - when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his Halo ?" X: "Ford Madox Brown being patronised by Holman Hunt" XI: "The Small Hours in the Sixties at 16, Cheyne Walk. - Algnernon Reading "Anactoria" to Gabriel and William.
Seller Inventory # 31906AB
Contact seller
Report this item
