The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at Archive.org there’s a 1906 book, The Trial of Oscar Wilde: From the Shorthand Reports whose contents are what you’d expect from the title. Browsing through the other files there revealed further items of note such as this edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol published a year later and illustrated throughout by J Latimer Wilson. The page layout of text plus a narrow picture is uncommon, and from the date of publication it’s interesting to see that despite Wilde’s shattered reputation there was still money to be made printing his books.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

Among the other volumes are two finely illustrated editions of his short stories. The edition of A House of Pomegranates below comes with drawings by Ben Kutcher, an artist about whom I know nothing other than his style is very similar to that of the great Harry Clarke. The introduction is a surprise, a serious appraisal of Wilde’s life by HL Mencken who admired the way the author stood against the prevailing morality of the day. There’s also an edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales from 1920 illustrated by Charles Robinson.

The House of Pomegranates (1918).

These books are mainly of note for their decoration, however. Of more interest to Wilde enthusiasts is a first edition of Robert Hichens’ The Green Carnation from 1894. Hichens was a friend of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and, according to McKenna’s book, a fellow Uranian (ie: gay) who knew the pair well enough to be able to pen a scandalous roman à clef based on their relationship, helping to confirm for public opinion much that was suspected about Wilde’s outrageous lifestyle. Both Wilde and Douglas disowned Hichens and repudiated the novel but, coming a year before the Queensbury libel trial, it did neither of them any favours. Those curious to read the exploits of “Esmé Amarinth” and “Lord Reginald Hastings” may download a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Uranian inspirations
• Henry Keen’s Dorian Gray
• The real Basil Hallwards
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Oscar Wilde playing cards
• Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

The Triumph of the Phallus (1700–1750).

We haven’t had a decent phallus picture here for a while (well, a couple of months…) so here’s one part of a three-part French engraving after a drawing by Francesco Salviati (1510–1563). Another great print from the British Museum collection. I’ll leave you to discover the triumphant member’s destination.

Via Jahsonic.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Phallus phénoménal
• Phallic bibelots
• Phallic worship
• The art of ejaculation

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.

Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended to do something for this then got sidetracked by work on the Alice in Wonderland calendar but I’ve picked out a couple of the (inevitably) black-and-white pieces which I thought stood out. The death’s-head moth on @ndy paciorek’s picture below makes a convenient link with yesterday’s post.

Meanwhile, there’s further Orchideengarten goodness over at Arthur Magazine.

Bookplate by @ndy paciorek.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Der Orchideengarten illustrated
• David Becket’s bookplates
• Der Orchideengarten

Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence today is rarely acknowledged despite being credited as the world’s first fantasy magazine. Information is scarce and these scans come from Will’s own copies which is why I’ve posted fifteen more below the fold; you can’t see this stuff anywhere else. A Journey Round My Skull featured some covers and a different set of interior illustrations earlier this year, and there should be a new post complementing this one with more of the magazine’s stunning cover designs.

What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years. Some are almost Expressionist in style, while the Wild Hunt series below shows a distinct Goya influence. I’d love to know how the written content matches the illustrations; I suspect there’s the same difference of atmosphere and emphasis to American weird fiction as there is in the drawings.

Update: Will’s new post is Watering the Toxic Garden which will be followed on Thursday by the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest.

Click on any of these pictures for a larger version.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Der Orchideengarten
• The Great God Pan
• Jugend Magazine
• Meggendorfer’s Blatter
• Simplicissimus

I wrote about Peter Shaffer’s fascinating play, Equus, in September last year, and in passing touched on the horse and Mari Lwyd-inspired paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins which seemed to complement the play’s themes of sexuality and passionate obsession. Callum James had been having similar thoughts about Clive’s art and urged his friends at The Old Stile Press to bring play and artist together. Clive was in touch last week to let me know that his illustrated edition of the play is now in print. The Old Stile Press produce limited collectors’ editions of books to the highest standard. Consequently these are expensive works but then they’re as much art pieces as books, as you can see from the care which has been lavished on this particular volume. Nice to see one of my favourite typefaces, Bodoni, used for the text.

Also in touch last week was photographer Gray Scott with news of this striking picture entitled Executionist which also happens to be a limited edition print. This is another expensive piece—as limited prints tend to be—but there’s no law that says the best things have to be cheap, is there?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dark horses
• Gray Scott

Both issues of Wyndham Lewis’s avant garde art and literature journal can be found in a collection of similar publications from the Modernist years here. I’ve always liked the bold graphics of Lewis and his fellow Vorticists, and BLAST 2, “the War Number”, is especially good in that regard. The MJP site reminds us that BLAST is still under copyright control outside the US and is also available in facsimile editions from Gingko Press.

BLAST was the quintessential modernist little magazine. Founded by Wyndham Lewis, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, it ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it, along with some of its key contributors. Its purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened Vorticism by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in visual art.

The original BLAST was published by Aubrey Beardsley’s first publisher, John Lane, and it’s fascinating to see Lane advertising back issues of The Yellow Book in pages which include Lewis’s anti-Victorian polemic. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for copies of the Art Nouveau journal Ver Sacrum to turn up somewhere. If anyone runs across quality scans, please leave a comment.

Via Things Magazine.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits

I should have mentioned this a lot sooner considering the museum sent me a copy of the exhibition prospectus. Maison d’Ailleurs is the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and their current exhibition is Lines of Flight—Mervyn Peake, the Illustrated Work. Yverdon-les-Bains is too out of the way for most of us but the event gives me another excuse to draw attention to Peake’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll; some of the drawings from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark are among the works on display until February 14, 2010.

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) is celebrated today as the writer of the extraordinary series of novels about Titus Groan (often referred to as the Gormenghast books). Yet, during his lifetime he was more known for his graphic work.

From 1939 and for almost two decades, Peake produced illustrations both for his own work (Captain Slaughterboard; Rhymes without Reason) and for classics (Household Tales by the brothers Grimm; Alice in Wonderland; Treasure Island). His mastery of the pen and the pencil were unrivalled. Visually, his style could be disarmingly economical, using very pure and clean single lines to create a striking sense of volume. But with cross-hatching and dots Peake could also make his drawings look like engravings, providing the characters and objects he depicted, or the background to them, with rich and varied textures and a wide range of shades. (More.)

For more of Peake’s illustration work, see Mervynpeake.org.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• The Illustrators of Alice

As you might expect, Archive.org has a lot of Alice in Wonderland adaptations, including a silent film version whose poor picture quality makes any attempt to watch it a chore. Among the many books in their collection one of the best is this illustrated edition from 1907 by Charles Robinson, brother of the equally talented William Heath. The full-page illustrations are especially good for their swirling embellishments, and I like the way he establishes the playing card motifs very early on. But the PDF version of the book also shows his inventive page layouts with narrow vignettes cutting through the text and the margins featuring tiny figures running about. The colour plates aren’t so impressive but his black-and-white work makes up for that.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937
• The Illustrators of Alice

Humpty Dumpty by EB Thurstan (1930).

A preoccupation of the past couple of weeks has been Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as I’ve been working on an Alice in Wonderland project which I’ll unveil shortly. Looking around at some of the numerous visual interpretations of the stories I came across two portfolios I hadn’t seen before by comic artist Frank Brunner. These are from the late Seventies, and typically for that decade they work an erotic twist on the books by adding ten years to Alice’s age whilst depriving her of clothes. Nudity aside, Brunner’s drawings don’t depart from tradition very much—or add much, for that matter—but I did notice that he’d based his Humpty Dumpty figure on an earlier version by illustrator EB Thurstan.

Humpty Dumpty by Frank Brunner (1978?).

The reason Thurstan’s Humpty is so familiar is that I’d borrowed it myself for one of the many appearances by the character in the Lord Horror comic series, Reverbstorm. Humpty’s presence there would involve too much explanation so you’ll have to be satisfied with the character who explains Jabberwocky remaining inexplicable. As for Brunner’s drawings, you can see coloured versions on his website.

Humpty Dumpty from Reverbstorm #3 (1994).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Illustrations by Raphaël Freida for a 1931 edition of Thaïs by Anatole France. I hadn’t come across Freida before and it’s impossible to say more about him or his work, information being frustratingly scant. The site where these are from has other editions of the same book illustrated by Georges Rochegrosse and Frank C Papé.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).

This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ interests tick a list of my own obsessions, being a tale which seems to originate in the question “What would it be like if you crossed Piranesi’s Prisons etchings with Brueghel’s Tower of Babel?” The protagonist of La Tour, Giovanni Battista, has his name borrowed from Piranesi’s forenames and his appearance taken from Orson Welles’ Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. The story owes something to Kafka, although it lacks Kafka’s drift towards paradox, concerning a colossal building referred to throughout as The Tower, a structure we only ever see in close-up—and then mostly from the inside—but whose height must reach several thousand feet.

Battista (above) is one of the Keepers, a group of men charged with maintaining small sections of the Tower whose structure suffers continual decay and collapse. Tired of years spent in complete isolation, and concerned that other Keepers aren’t doing their job, Battista goes in search of the Tower’s feared Inspectors, only to discover that the lack of maintenance is endemic and few of the Tower’s scattered residents have any idea of the origin or purpose of the vast building where they’ve spent their lives, never mind a concern for its upkeep. There are no Inspectors, and while Battista is worried at the beginning about vines in the stonework, we later see small forests growing among the ruins. Kafka resonances come with the mention of the mysterious Base, and the equally mysterious Pioneers, those builders and engineers who went ahead years or even centuries before, climbing skyward.

It’s a surprise reading this book after the first two with their late 19th and early 20th century appearance. The world of La Tour is quite medieval, especially the small community in which Battista finds himself after a near-fatal fall from a jerry-rigged kite. The most sophisticated technology we see is in the home of a doctor, Elias, whose house contains histories of the Tower’s construction as well as astrolabes and armillary spheres. (The latter device plays a key role in a later story.) The only clue we’re in the Obscure World at all comes with a close view of a polyhedral globe which shows the Tower on one face with the cities of Xhystos and Samaris on the others. Aside from Elias, none of the inhabitants of the Tower are aware of, or curious about, anything outside their vast building.

Elias also has a collection of paintings which show the history of the Tower’s design. Several of these are Schuiten’s variations on famous pictures, including the Brueghel Tower of Babel. Less familiar is a version of the curious Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88) by Erastus Salisbury Field. The paintings in the Tower are distinguished by being shown in colour while everything else is black-and-white, a distinction used later in the story to striking effect.

Historical Monument of the American Republic by Erastus Salisbury Field (1867–88).

This is a far longer book than the previous ones, and its final third concerns a fascinating journey of several weeks by Battista and a young woman, Milena, up the Tower in search of the Pioneers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil the story but it rather runs out of steam at the end; as with Les Murailles de Samaris there’s a feeling that the creators weren’t sure what to do with their splendid creation once they’d invented it. But the drawing more than makes up for that, with Schuiten once again showing an apparently effortless mastery of a given style, superbly rendering walls of Piranesian vastness, Chartres-like flying buttresses and masses of cross-hatched shading. The journey to the top of the Tower—and the return down—is worth it for the view alone.

• Piranesi / Schuiten. Arquitectura, Comics y Clasicismo | A Spanish examination of Piranesi’s influence on Schuiten.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

Les Chansons de Bilitis (1922).

I’ve posted examples of George Barbier’s Art Deco drawings before but online examples of his work outside the world of fashion illustration have been difficult to find. The Bunka Women’s University Library corrects that with a collection of high-quality scans which include a book about the artist, George Barbier, Étude Critique (1929) by Jean‐Louis Vaudoyer. There’s also his adaptation of the Sapphic classic by Pierre Loüys, Les Chansons de Bilitis, from 1922. The drawings there lack the customary ardour of other adaptations but they’re marvellously elegant nonetheless, with some beautiful page designs.

Note: these books can’t be linked to individually, you need to follow the links from “Art Deco illustrated books” in their site menu.

Nijinsky (1913).

Poèmes en Prose (1928).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky

Back in February I posted some pictures from a 1971 collection of Art Nouveau illustration and design, some of which were competition entries from The Studio magazine. The Studio, which later became the long-running Studio International, can be seen from issue 11 onwards at Archive.org now that they’ve started uploading Google’s book scans. I’ve only looked at one of these so far, Volume 11–13 which runs over 850 pages and so takes some time to go through, as do all these rather unwieldy PDF books. The issues are missing their covers and so aren’t dated but would appear to be from around 1896 to 1898, one of the final entries being a memorial piece for Aubrey Beardsley who died that year; The Studio was the magazine which had introduced Beardsley to the public only five years earlier.

The Studio ran regular competitions among its readers and the examples shown here are from some of those. I especially like these type designs; dare we assume that the “Dorian” design below is named after Dorian Gray? As a whole the magazine is an odd mix of very dull Victorian art of the landscapes and artisans type, with occasional flares of interest when they devote a feature to the emerging Art Nouveau style or profile a Symbolist artist such as Giovanni Segantini.

A note for anyone wishing to download Google scans from Archive.org: some of the PDF links lead you to a Google page where they’re trying to sell you an e-text or get you to buy a book. To see the available files you need to click “All Files: HTTP”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine

Chat Noir poster (1896).

We had Louis Wain yesterday so it only seems right to follow with the other notable cat artist of the period, and also the one whose work I prefer, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923).

Steinlen’s designs for the Montmartre cabaret, Le Chat Noir, of which there are many variations, are dismayingly ubiquitous in contemporary Paris, so much so that you quickly tire of his haloed feline when wandering the streets. Parisians regard Steinlen’s posters the way Londoners regard pictures of Beefeaters; they’re part of the background noise of the capital city, intended solely for tourists. A shame because it really is a splendid cat.

The Apotheosis of the Cats (c. 1890).

Steinlen’s cat pieces run the gamut of styles and variations, from delicate life studies and bronze sculptures to works such as the three-metres wide mural above depicting the advent of some ultimate feline deity. Among his many drawings he produced a number of marvellous cartoon sequences like the one below featuring cats fighting, playing and generally getting into trouble. Some of these can be found on Flickr here and here.

For more Steinlen, including his non-feline works, there’s Steinlen.net.

The End of a Goldfish.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Louis Wain at Nunnington Hall
• The Boy Who Drew Cats
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Monsieur Chat

Still reading Moby Dick at a leisurely pace. After finishing Melville’s chapters on the representations of whales I thought I’d see if the pictures he most prefers are online anywhere. A vain search, as it turns out, but I did discover this splendid depiction, Stranded Sperm Whale, by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam (1565–1607).

On 19 December 1601, a sperm whale washed up near Beverwijk. Crowds of people came to see the sight. Among them Jan Saenredam, who made this print. He has depicted himself drawing on the left.

The description continues at the Rijksmuseum site from which this copy originates. Mr Peacay of BibliOdyssey has a very large copy on his Flickr pages which shows more of the fine detail. Melville is highly critical of poor depictions of whales but I suspect he would have liked this one. As well as the local colour and allegorical border elements, Saenredam faithfully renders his dead whale, even leaving space for the drooping scape of cetacean penis. In a similar, if more mundane manner, there’s this engraving by Jacob Matham.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Whale again
• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

From David Becket: His Book of Bookplates, a slim volume published in 1906. The wonderfully spare style of these looks advanced for the time but probably owes something to William Nicholson’s earlier work. Nicholson collaborated with brother-in-law James Pryde (as “The Beggarstaffs”) on poster designs with the same reduced detail, masses of black and hand-drawn type.

For 764 (!) further bookplates, see LUNA Commons.

Enthusiasts of Charles Ricketts’ illustrations can find book collections of his drawings and paintings but the artist (with partner Charles Shannon) was also a printer, typographer and book designer who would no doubt have preferred his illustrations to be seen in their intended setting. Archive.org has a few choices examples of Rickett’s books, of which the most profusely illustrated is Hero and Leander (1894), Christopher Marlowe’s poem (completed by George Chapman).

Also of interest is Danaë (1903) by Thomas Sturge Moore with its black and red type, A Bibliography of the Books Issued by Hacon & Ricketts (1904), and A Defence of the Revival of Printing (1899). The latter is of interest to book designers and typographers for its presentation of Ricketts’ aesthetic philosophy. Ricketts’ and Shannon’s books made continual use of a small leaf motif as a pilcrow to mark a fresh paragraph. In A Defence of the Revival of Printing Ricketts discusses his replacement for the ampersand (&), which he disliked, preferring instead a new character combining the letters E and T, ampersands being a contraction of the Latin word “et”. There’s also some discussion of his unique type designs which he charmingly refers to as “founts”, preferring, like contemporary William Morris, the antique terminology.

Colophon from Hero and Leander. A rose forms the monogram of Ricketts’ and Shannon’s Vale Press.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Dorian Gray revisited

Another illustrated Shakespeare and another Archive.org PDF. Lucy Fitch Perkins’ adaptation dates from 1907 and while her colour work in this volume is distinctly bland, her ink drawings are styled with some tasty Art Nouveau flourishes. Puck with bat wings is an unusual touch.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Rackham’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Something for the Summer Solstice, the whole of Arthur Rackham’s Shakespeare at Archive.org. Rackham’s paintings are classics of the period but for me William Heath Robinson’s black and white drawings are the superior renderings of this story. Happily you can see that book as well.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Midsummer Night’s Dadd
• William Heath Robinson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

Thus the judgement of a reviewer examining Aubrey Beardsley’s work in The Graphic for May 23, 1896. The work in question was Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock illustrations being unveiled for the first time in the second number of The Savoy, the magazine which Beardsley co-founded with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers as a rival to the staid Yellow Book, also reviewed in the same column. Beardsley’s illustrations for Pope are now considered some of his very finest works and it’s difficult from our perspective to find any grotesquery there at all. It may be a reference to The Cave of Spleen, a drawing which saw the brief return of Beardsley’s earlier foetus creatures and a work to which some of Harry Clarke’s style would seem to owe a debt. In which case the reviewer should have been grateful to be spared the giant phalluses of The Lysistrata which Aubrey was also drawing for Smithers at this time.

The column above is one of many mentions of Beardsley and company to be found at the British Library’s new online archive of 19th century British newspapers. What might be a treasure trove is compromised slightly for me by being a collection of newspapers only, rather than magazines. A magazine database would give us all of The Savoy and The Yellow Book, as well as other titles which featured the work of fin de siècle illustrators. Patience is the key here, with every passing year more of the past becomes easily accessible.

So now, given the quantity of references there’s likely to be, dare I search for Oscar Wilde?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch

Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

The sight of one of Picasso’s many versions of Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Velázquez earlier this week prompts this post. An endlessly fascinating painting whose influence runs through three hundred years of art history. That influence isn’t so surprising if you consider this as a painter’s painting; it certainly never seems to figure in the canon of favourite works among the wider public. But artists are beguiled by the games it plays with our ways of seeing: a self-portrait of the artist painting a subject (the royal couple) standing where the viewer would be, with the couple seen in reflection in the mirror on the back wall. We are the watchers and the watched. Wikimedia Commons has a decently large copy of the painting.

I’ve long been fascinated by the detail of the queen’s chamberlain, Don José Nieto Velázquez, standing on the steps at the back of the picture. Lines of perspective draw our attention to his figure, not only the perspective of the room but also the line which can be drawn across the heads of the three figures in the foreground right. I always look to see how Don José is treated in subsequent variations, some of which appear below.

Las Meninas, after Velázquez (c. 1778) by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.

One of the commonplaces of contemporary art is artworks about other artworks. Goya’s etching shows that this idea is by no means a new one. Goya was apparently dissatisfied with his attempt, and its main interest is the degree to which he distorts various parts of the picture.

The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar (1919) by Harry Clarke.

Harry Clarke scholar Nicola Gordon Bowe proposed in The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (1989) that the figure in the background of this Poe illustration was a version of Don José. Clarke’s picture also has a similar grouping of foreground figures which adds to the speculation. The division of space in the Velázquez painting would have held considerable appeal for an artist used to dealing with similar divisions in his stained glass window designs. Will at A Journey Round My Skull recently uploaded a set of high-resolution scans of Clarke’s Poe drawings and paintings.

Las Meninas (after Velazquez) (1957) by Pablo Picasso.

In the 1950s Picasso took to producing a series of variations on favourite paintings. There are 44 versions of Las Meninas, some more abstract than others. This one reminds me of Guernica and I like the humour of presenting Velázquez’s dog—one of the great dogs of art history—as though it’s been drawn by Nicolas Pertusato, the child who attempts to rouse the animal with his foot. Velázquez here has a head surmounting a spindly body comprised of the Order of Santiago cross.

Las Meninas (1960) by Salvador Dalí.

Salvador Dalí venerated Velázquez and he happily quoted other artists throughout his career so it’s no surprise to find variations of Las Meninas. This wins the award for the most eccentric, with the figures reduced to numerals. Closer examination shows it to be quite clever the way each number corresponds to a different figure. The use of the number 7 for the artist and for Don José makes sense when you consider that they share the same surname. Don José turns up alone is another painting the same year, a work entitled Maelstrom: Portrait of Juan de Pareja fixing a string of his mandolin.

Picasso’s Meninas (1973) by Richard Hamilton.

Richard Hamilton’s aquatint is equally playful, substituting Velázquez with Picasso and his works.

The Haunter of the Dark (1986).

I seem to have referred to my own work quite a lot recently, and here’s some more of it. The panel on the right quotes from Harry Clarke’s Poe illustration and so can be considered as continuing a trace element of the shadowy Don.

Las Meninas (Self Portrait) (1987) by Joel-Peter Witkin.

Joel-Peter Witkin has quoted Picasso’s works frequently in his photo-tableaux so the Picasso-esque figure on the right is perhaps inevitable. Witkin also has a considerable fondness for dead things so it’s quite likely that the dog in this photograph isn’t sleeping.

I’ll be surprised if there haven’t been a lot more variations during the past twenty years. If anyone knows of any which are better than this item by Antonio Guijarro Morales, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• Reflections of Narcissus
• My pastiches
• Guernica, seventy years on
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).

Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the way inevitably to Surrealism, especially in dream lithographs like the one below.

Vision from Dans le Rêve (1879).

I compounded that Symbolist/Surrealist association when I was drawing The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 by showing Ardois-Boonot’s Dream Landscape (which Lovecraft doesn’t describe beyond the word “blasphemous”) as being a Max Ernst-style frottage canvas with a Redon eye rising from the murk. Cthulhu’s presence reduced to a single ocular motif like the eye of Sauron.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

And while we’re on the subject there’s Guy Maddin’s typically phantasmic short, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity made for the BBC in 1995. Ostensibly based on the balloon picture above, this manages to reference a host of other Redon lithographs and charcoal drawings in the space of four-and-a-half minutes. Sublimely weird and weirdly sublime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours
• The Heart of the World

Following some print links led me once again to the University of Heidelberg and a collection of engravings by Jean Le Pautre (1618–1682), the grandly-titled Oeuvres D’Architecture De Jean Le Pautre, Architecte, Dessinateur & Graveur du Roi (Band 1): Contenant les Frises, Feuillages, Montans ou Pilastres, Grotesques, Moresques, Panneaux, Placarts, Trumeaux, Lambris, Amortissements, Plafonds, & généralement tout ce qui concerne l’Ornement. This was published in Paris in 1751 and is a splendid series of architectural details including some eye-popping friezes of Rococo turmoil with a profusion of dragons, putti, hippogriffs, mermen and many other hybrids rioting among whiplash foliage. As with other works at Heidelberg, you can either examine the prints one at a time or download the lot as a single PDF.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

An architectural rendering by Arthur Beresford Pite (1861–1934) whose proposal for a West End club house after the style of Viollet-le-Duc’s Gothic revivalism induced howls of outrage from the architectural establishment when it won the RIBA’s Soane Medallion in March, 1882. I know this drawing solely from an appearance in Felix Barker & Ralph Hyde’s London as it might have been (1982) where it fascinates not only for being one of the least likely proposals in the entire book but also for its vision of Georgian London as some kind of medieval throwback closer to Carcassonne than Cavendish Square. This copy is from a splendid Flickr set which features a wealth of fanciful architecture, real and imagined. Lots of favourites there, including the great Hugh Ferriss.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Viollet-le-Duc
• Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
• Architectural renderings by HW Brewer

Or Gramato-graphices. In quo varia scripturae emblemata, belgicis, germanicis, italicis, hispanicis, gallicis characteribus exaata… scripta, aeri incisa, et impressa per Cornelium Boissenium Enchusanum to give the full title. A treatise on penmanship and calligraphy from 1605 by Cornelis Dirckszoon Boissens. Also another free PDF at Archive.org. Searching for better reproductions turned up this stunning engraving by Boissens in the Rijksmuseum collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

Satire on False Perspective by William Hogarth (1753).

Whoever makes a Design without the knowledge of Perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are shewn in this Frontispiece.

More eye-deceiving art for All Fools’ Day. Everyone knows MC Escher’s pictures which continually played with the rules of perspective. Hogarth’s satire is less well-known and may even be the first of its kind. I haven’t seen any examples earlier than this.

A few contemporary equivalents follow, all of which can be found at Impossible World, a site devoted to visual disjunction.

Piranesi in Budapest by István Orosz.

De wachtkamer van de artistieke Architect by Jos de Mey.

Dreams by Nikol.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Trompe l’oeil

left: No title or date; right: Joker from a playing card set (1924).

A recent post by Silent-Porn-Star draws my attention to Swedish illustrator and cartoonist Einar Nerman (1888–1983) whose work I don’t recall having come across before. There isn’t much available to see online unfortunately, a shame as SPS’s posting of a 1926 cigarette ad shows a distinct Beardsley influence. Nerman seems known chiefly today for his caricatures of Greta Garbo, one of which was used on a commemorative postage stamp in 2005.

Greta Garbo.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Oscar Wilde playing cards
• Surrealist cartomancy

Louis Rhead (1916).

Continuing from the weekend’s book discovery, a browse at Archive.org reveals many PDF editions of the Arabian Nights. No surprise given the enduring popularity of the stories, and no surprise either that the texts are of variable quality, most of them diluted from the earthy and inventive originals to the status of the mildest fairy tales. The exotic settings make for some fine illustrations, however, a selection of which follow. Edmund Dulac’s edition of Sindbad the Sailor is a typically masterful adaptation by one of the great illustrators.

HJ Ford (1898).

Walter Paget (1907?).

The Brothers Dalziel (1865).

Edmund Dulac (1914).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward William Lane’s Arabian Nights Entertainments

Or Fables and other short poems : collected from the most celebrated English authors : the whole curiously engrav’d for the practice & amusement of young gentlemen & ladies in the art of writing to give its full title, a children’s primer from 1731 and another free title available at Archive.org. John Bickham was one of the famous family of engravers among whom George the Elder is particularly celebrated for his own stunning penmanship in The Universal Penman (1740), a book which is still in print. The moral fables here are mostly single-page verse pieces with titles such as The Lady and the Wasp or The Spaniel and the Camelion. One short piece, On Liberty, is especially pertinent following the weekend when the Convention on Modern Liberty declared its mission to resist the rise of the Total Surveillance State.

Oh Liberty! thou Goddess heav’nly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight;
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling Plenty leads thy wanton train.
Eas’d of her Load, Subjection grows more light,
And Poverty looks chearful in thy Sight.
Thou mak’st the gloomy face of Nature gay,
Giv’st Beauty to the Sun, and pleasure to the Day.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

From the title pages.

All of Kircher’s illustrations fascinate for their detail and often bizarre or startling images. The high quality scans of his 1667 opus, China Monumentis, at VTS don’t disappoint, especially in the close-ups.

Chinese mythology.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive