ARISTOPHANES; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Lysistrata.

With The Infamous ‘Adoration Of The Penis’

ARISTOPHANES; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Lysistrata. London: Beardsley Press. 1927.

4to. Original silver cloth-backed black boards, top-edge trimmed, the others uncut, printed patterned endpapers; pp. 99, [1], with 9 mounted illustrations (of which 8 by Beardsley, see below); title-page incorporating Beardsley’s personal bookplate design; extremities and spine a little worn; sporadic light foxing, light offsetting from plates, lightly toned throughout; overall a very good copy.

Second English edition of Beardsley’s eight illustrations to Lysistrata, one of 750 copies (500 for the United Kingdom and 250 for the U.S.); this edition includes – seemingly for the first time – a ninth illustration, the notorious forgery ‘The Adoration of the Penis’.

In his play Lysistrata, fifth-century BC Athenian playwright Aristophanes turns the conventions of the polis upside down: women withhold sex from their husbands to force them to end the Peloponnesian War, creating a comic but pointed challenge to traditional male authority. First published in London by Leonard Smithers in an edition of one hundred copies in 1896, Beardsley’s illustrations accompanied the anonymous translation by Samuel Smith (1867–1938), an Oxford friend of the Decadent poet and Beardsley collaborator Ernest Dowson (1867–1900).

In a letter dated 11 August 1896, Beardsley wrote to the French writer Marc-André Raffalovich (1864–1934) that he thought the illustrations were ‘in a way the best things I have ever done’ (Maas, p. 150). Having studied Greek vase painting at the British Museum in 1894, he drew on the style of ancient Greek pottery while pushing its erotic and comic elements to extremes. The absence of backgrounds, together with ‘closed outlines and bold dots and rare decorated blacks’, gives the designs their distinctive graphic force (Reade, pp. 360–1).

Samuels Lasner 107c; Maas, Duncan, and Good eds., The Letters of Aubrey Bearsley (1971); Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, London, Antique Collectors’ Club (1987).

SKU: 2125977