‘One of the Strongest Things I Have Ever Done’
JONSON, Ben; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator); Vincent O'SULLIVAN. Volpone: or The Foxe. A new edition … New York: John Lane. 1898.
4to. Publisher’s green bevelled cloth, ornate gilt decoration and lettering to upper cover by Beardsley, gilt lettering to spine; pp. xlv, [1 (blank)], 193, [1]; 8 illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley comprising half-title (repeating cover design), frontispiece, and 6 inhabited initials, title-page printed in red and black; spine ends bumped, very slight wear to bevelled edges and corners, and minor rubbing to gilt decoration to upper board; endpapers a little browned; an excellent copy, largely unopened; early ink stamp of the Baragwanath family of Cornwall to front free endpaper.
No. 193 of 100 copies of the American sub-issue of Beardsley’s final, uncompleted commission, published eight months after the artist’s death and poignantly dedicated to his mother, with a eulogy by Robert Ross.
This sub-issue lacks Beardsley’s ‘Puck on Pegasus’ device in gilt to the rear cover, although it does appear on the title-page. There are six initials in total, one of which repeated (pp. 55 and 116). Beardsley was commissioned by Leonard Smithers to illustrate this book, originally conceived as an edition de luxe with twenty four plates, frontispiece, initial letters and small drawings, in November 1897. His health was already failing due to tuberculosis, and when he died in March 1898 he had only produced the illustrations seen here. Despite his fading powers, Beardsley was excited about the project, finding that Jonson’s depiction of a greedy and depraved world chimed with his own artistic vision.
He wrote that ‘I carry Volpone about with me from dawn to dawn and dream of nothing else’ and considered his illustration for the frontispiece, ‘Volpone Adoring His Treasure’, to be ‘one of the strongest things I have ever done’ (cited in Nelson, p. 163). Such was the importance attached to this book as a monument to Beardsley’s talent that a number of his fellow Decadents were involved in the final publication. Robert Ross wrote an affectionate eulogy that formed the basis of his 1909 biography of Beardsley, Vincent O’Sullivan provided an essay on Jonson that tied him to the fin-de-siècle sensibility, and Ernest Dowson anonymously edited the text.
Gertner Zatlin 1080–1089r; Samuels Lasner 129. See Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde and Dowson (2000).
SKU: 2125420