ROSS, Robert; Aymer VALLANCE. Aubrey Beardsley … with Sixteen Full-Page Illustrations and a Revised Iconography.

Annotated & Inscribed by Beardsley’s Patron

ROSS, Robert; Aymer VALLANCE. Aubrey Beardsley … with Sixteen Full-Page Illustrations and a Revised Iconography. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head and New York: John Lane Company. 1909 (but November 1908).

8vo. Publisher’s red cloth, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, masked Pierrot by Beardsley gilt to upper board, top-edge gilt; pp. 112, [12 (advertisements)]; 16 plates by Beardsley including frontispiece; title-page by Beardsley adapted from Keynotes, advertisements printed in red and black; wanting the uncommon dust-jacket, spine sunned, corners bumped; light waterstaining to p. 50 and facing plate, else internally very good; gift inscription to front free endpaper ‘from Herbert Jerome Pollard’, dated December 1908 (see below).

First edition thus of Ross’s biography of Beardsley, with a revised version of Vallance’s iconography of Beardsley’s works, this copy inscribed to an unknown recipient by Hubert ‘Jerome’ Pollitt (1872–1942), Beardsley’s patron and owner of most of the Lysistrata drawings.

Ross’s text had initially appeared as a eulogy to Beardsley, published in the first edition of Beardsley’s last major project, Volpone; Beardsley had died before completing the illustrations. Vallance’s iconography is a revised version of that which appeared in A Book of Fifty Drawings.

Provenance: gift inscription from Herbert Charles ‘Jerome’ Pollitt (1871–1942), Beardsley’s major patron, for whom Beardsley adapted his own bookplate design, one of only three bookplates Beardsley completed during his lifetime. Pollitt, who had been president of Footlights during his time at Cambridge, was known for his cross-dressing performances as Diane de Rougy and for his friendships with Beardsley and Smithers.

He later entered into a relationship with Aleister Crowley, who ‘lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me’ (Crowley, quoted in Kaczynski, Perdurabo (2012), p. 38). Pollitt owned many of Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings, and on his deathbed Beardsley implored Smithers ‘to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same’.

In this copy, thirty-two drawings in Vallance’s catalogue have been marked up, apparently indicating which works were in Pollitt’s collection. Amongst them are Aubrey Beardsley’s bookplate, all eight drawings listed for Lysistrata, five drawings for Volpone (these explicitly listed as the property of ‘Herbert J. Pollit, Esq.’); one is attributed to the collection of ‘Walter Pollett Esq.’, likely erroneously. Pollitt adds in manuscript at the end ‘The Impatient Waiter’ (i.e. ‘The Impatient Adulterer’), Beardsley’s explicit drawing of a masturbating voyeur for Juvenal’s Sixth Satire. ‘Beardsley had begun the drawing in August 1896, directly after completing his Lysistrata series whilst staying at Boscombe, but left it incomplete at that time. Perhaps realising that it could not be printed, he offered it to his new friend and patron Herbert Pollitt, when the latter visited him at Bournemouth in late April 1897. Beardsley wrote to Pollitt on 3rd March to inform him “the little drawing for Juvenal VI 237–8 is done.”’ (V&A, online).

Gertner Zatlin 1061 (for Pollitt’s ‘Impatient Adulterer’); Samuels Lasner 154.

SKU: 2126082