BURDETT, Osbert. The Beardsley Period. An Essay in Perspective.

With a Bookplate by Austin Osman Spare

BURDETT, Osbert. The Beardsley Period. An Essay in Perspective. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited. 1925.

8vo. Publisher’s dark grey cloth, Art Nouveau foliate design to upper board in blind, spine lettered in gilt; pp. xi, [1 (blank)], 302, [6 (advertisements)], 4 ff. advertisements on yellow paper bound in at start and end; a few small chips to spine ends; sporadic light foxing; else a very good copy; large bookplate of Pickford Waller designed by Austin Osman Spare, dated 1923 (see below).

First edition of this study of the literary and artistic culture of the 1890s by Osbert Burdett, issued by the Bodley Head; this copy is from the library of notable Beardsley collector Pickford Waller, Austin Osman Spare’s primary patron, with a striking ex-libris designed by Spare himself.

Burdett was the author of The Idea of Coventry Patmore (1921), William Blake (1926), W.E. Gladstone (1928), The Brownings (1928), and The Two Carlyles (1930). In the same year that The Beardsley Period was published, Burdett’s sister, Lady Alsina Gwyer, established, with Geoffrey Gwyer, the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer (now Faber & Faber); T.S. Eliot joined Faber & Gwyer’s Board of Directors in the same year. The title is taken from Beerbohm’s quote ‘I belong to the Beardsley period’.

He was ‘intimate with members of the “Uranian” circle, such as Forrest Reid and Edward Perry Warren, whose writings celebrate “boy-love” and the beauty of youth […] In The Beardsley Period […] he occupies himself primarily with the economic valence of Decadent critique.

These young men, Burdett argues, represented a “protest against a commercial society” […] [The Decadents’] aloofness and archness, their devotion to beauty, and their love for all things occult served to strengthen their capacity to perceive lack and vulgarity in the industrial world’ (Bristow ed., Extraordinary Aesthetes (2023)).

Adhered to the rear pastedown is a humorous poem on the present work and its publication:

‘So Punch, who in his more pugnacious days
Relentlessly assailed the aesthetic craze
No longer moved to posthumous invective
Welcomes this measured “essay in perspective”,
The Beardsley Period, where the author shows,
Conspicuous by their talents and their pose,
Contrasted with the drab Victorian back-cloth,
The men who spurned the creed of ash and sack-cloth […]’.

Provenance: Pickford Waller (1849–1930) was Spare’s primary patron, supporting the artist until his death. The bookplate was one of multiple designs produced by Spare for Waller; this one, dated AD 1923, incorporates a herm of Pan, a central motif in Spare’s work, and was reproduced in The Golden Hind 1:4 (July 1923). Waller was an interior decorator and designer, and a designer of bookplates himself. He was an early collector of Beardsley and of Whistler, having met the latter when he visited his studio with the artist Matthew White Ridley. Nearly one hundred Beardsley items from Waller’s collection appeared in Frank Hollings’s Catalogue 170, The Choice & Remarkably Extensive Beardsley Collection Assembled by the Late Pickford Waller, and the cover design (frequently misattributed to Beardsley) of Ernest Dowson’s 1889 Decorations in Verse and Prose is sometimes ascribed to him.

For the Spare bookplate, see North Lee 183.

SKU: 2125984