BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. Under the Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse … with Illustrations.

Table Talk & Taboo Tannhӓuser

BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. Under the Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse … with Illustrations. London and New York. John Lane, the Bodley Head. 1904.

4to. Publisher’s blue cloth, peacock-feather designs stamped in gilt to upper board, upper board and spine lettered directly in gilt; pp. xi, [5], 70, [71–80], [4 (advertisements)]; photogravure frontispiece, 14 plates by Beardsley included in pagination (of which one in colour) with printed tissue guards, two tailpieces by Beardsley in the text; hinges cracked, slight wear to corners and extremities (colour subtly retouched); half-title, frontispiece, and title reinforced with tissue to inner margin, offsetting to title and limitation statement, lightly toned throughout; a good copy.

First edition thus of John Lane’s expurgated version of Beardsley’s unfinished erotic work, including three hitherto unpublished drawings by Beardsley.

Beardsley’s ‘Fred Brown, N.E.A.C.’, a study of seven heads (pictured on the same page), and his intended frontispiece for Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret appear here for the first time. Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser – the first three chapters of which appeared in expurgated form as Under the Hill in the first issue of The Savoy (January 1896) – is inspired by the folkloric German tale of the knight and poet–musician Tannhäuser, who is lured into the Mountain of Venus and spends several years indulging in hedonistic pleasures.

Following the appearance of the first few chapters in The Savoy, in July 1896 ‘Smithers announced that serialization was discontinued, but that [Venus and Tannhäuser] would be published in book form with numerous illustrations as soon as Beardsley was well enough to complete it’ (Letters, quoted in Samuels Lasner). Beardsley’s erotic treatment of the legend remained unfinished, however, likely due to his conversion to Catholicism in 1897 as well as his declining health.

As well as Under the Hill, this volume contains ‘The Three Musicians’, ‘The Ballad of a Barber’, and Catullus’s Carmen CI, all previously published in The Savoy, as well as two letters to the press and ‘Table Talk of Aubrey Beardsley’, a series of aphorisms which Beardsley had been working on in the summer of 1896, ten of which are included here and are seemingly published for the first time. He writes that the Brompton Oratory is ‘the only place in London where one can forget that it is Sunday’, that Turner is ‘only a rhetorician in paint’, and complains ‘how few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did – sly dog!’ (pp. 63–64).

Samuels Lasner 141.

SKU: 2124727