With Evans’s Most Famous Beardsley Portrait
BEARDSLEY, Aubrey; Frederick H. EVANS. Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley. Facsimile Platinum Prints by Frederick H. Evans from the Twelve Original Drawings in his Collection with a Portrait Frontispiece. Twenty-Five Copies Privately Printed. S.l.: s.n. 1919.
4to. Publisher’s printed wrappers, housed in a clamshell morocco-backed box with cloth sides, raised bands ruled in gilt; marbled edges, red gilt morocco lettering-pieces; ff. [13], comprising 12 platinum prints after drawings by Aubrey Beardsley and a portrait frontispiece within a handsome Art Nouveau woodcut border signed by Evans in pencil and dated 1919, the prints and frontispiece mounted on brown card, the last 4 ff. provided in facsimile and mounted on paper slightly warmer in colour; c. 60-mm split to spine, but holding, a few spots to wrappers; slight offset to blank versos; else very well preserved.
One of twenty-five privately printed copies, extremely rare, of this handsome collection of facsimile platinum prints after twelve original drawings by Beardsley from the collection of his friend, the Pictorialist photographer Frederick Evans, also including a signed photograph of Beardsley by Evans, perhaps the most famous portrait of the artist.
A friend of George Bernard Shaw, Evans was a proprietor of Jones’ and Evans’ Bookshop near the Guildhall in Cheapside until 1898, when he turned to photography full-time; a monumental photographer of architecture, he was a member of the Linked Ring photographic society and soon befriended Alfred Stieglitz; he was the first British photographer to have his work featured in Stieglitz’s seminal photographic journal Camera Work.
Evans met the seventeen-year-old Beardsley in 1889, when Beardsley was working as a clerk for an insurance company. The shop was ‘but a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to London town … Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in him’ (Macfall, p. 39). Within a year, he was visiting daily. ‘Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly a footing that Evans would “swap” the books for which the youth craved in exchange for drawings’ (ibid.). Indeed, it was Evans who secured Beardsley’s first commission, recommending him to J.M. Dent for Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The portrait of Beardsley included here is one of two famous photographs Evans took of Beardsley around 1894: here, Beardsley gazes downwards, his head in his hands. The portrait frontispiece is here signed by Evans and dated 1919.
The present illustrations, from original drawings of Beardsley from Evans’s collection, were first published in the 1893 Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith and Richard Brindsley Sheridan, a small-format volume in which Beardsley’s illustrations appear as minute in-text illustrations or tailpieces, measuring not more than four centimetres; they can be appreciated in Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley not as mere ornaments to the text, but as works of art in their own right. Beardsley died of tuberculosis on 16 March 1898, aged only twenty-five. Published some two decades after Beardsley’s death, the present work appears to follow a similar set, in larger format, issued in a limited edition of ten copies in 1913, under the title Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley. Enlarged Facsimiles in Platinotype, comprising reproductions of the twelve drawings included here but issued without the portrait (we find only one copy, at Princeton).
We find a single copy in the UK, at the National Art Library, and one in the US (Metropolitan Museum of Art, the portrait of Beardsley unsigned).
SKU: 2124801