BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. Nineteen Early Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. From the Collection of Mr. Harold Hartley. With an Introduction by Georges Derry.

Previously Unpublished Puerilia, Privately Printed

BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. Nineteen Early Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. From the Collection of Mr. Harold Hartley. With an Introduction by Georges Derry. S.l.: privately printed. 1919.

4t4to. Original cloth-backed portfolio with paper sides, printed label to upper board, vestigial grey cloth ties; comprising 8-pp. pamphlet in publisher’s printed self-wrappers and 19 loose collotype plates; boards a little toned to extremities and rubbed to corners; old shelflabel to inside front board; marginal offsetting to illustration no. 1 from boards; else very good.

First limited edition, no. 11 of 150 copies signed by Harold Hartley, including nineteen previously unpublished comic illustrations by Beardsley of Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid.

These drawings were made by Beardsley in 1886, in his thirteenth to fourteenth year, whilst he was translating the Aeneid with his Form-master, H.A. Payne of the Brighton Grammar School.

‘It must be conceded that their artistic value is slight when compared with the astounding technique exhibited by Beardsley a comparatively few years after. They are not, however, entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship … What distinguishes these drawings from nearly all his early work is their delightful humour – their genuine, though crude, comicality’ (from the Introduction by ‘Georges Derry’, pseudonym of R.A. Walker).

Gertner Zatlin 47–65; Samuels Lasner 166.

SKU: 2108759