Well, two of them anyway… Discussion with commenter Noel in one of my old (and rather scant) posts about Albert Lewin’s 1945 film of The Picture of Dorian Gray touched on the fate of the original version of Dorian’s portrait (above). For some reason I’d always assumed this to have been produced by MGM’s art department despite a clear credit at the opening of the film for artist Henrique Medina (1901–1988). I no doubt miss this since my eyes always go to the credit for Ivan Albright (1897–1983), the artist responsible for the famous deteriorated final state of the picture (below). That painting is so splendidly grotesque its presence almost overpowers the entire film but its power would be lessened without the contrast of Medina’s elegant original. Examples of Medina’s other portrait works show a distinct similarity.

Noel pointed the way to photos from the LIFE magazine archives which show Ivan Albright and his identical twin brother, Malvin, at work on the portrait. (Another here.) Fascinating not only to see an early stage of the painting but also a dummy of the decayed Dorian they were using as a model.

Albright’s dissolute masterpiece can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago, together with a number of his other works. Noel notes that Medina’s picture was bought at auction for $25,000 but its current whereabouts and ownership remain a mystery. If anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Or the temptations of Uncle Sam… An editorial cartoon from 1919 by Oliver Herford (1863–1935) showing how the nonsense argument of “X leads to Y” goes back a long way. These imps are more silly than frightening, Herford should have used this as the starting point for a comic strip: Rum Demon and the Narcotics.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Smoke
• Seamen in great distress eat one another
• Hep cats
• German opium smokers, 1900

An Austin Spare pastel (?), Astral Body and Ghost, from the collection of Cyclobe’s Ossian Brown adorns the label of this edition of Absinthe Brevans. Would the artist approve? Do we have to ask? He spent much of his life haunting pubs and I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t tried absinthe when he was a young Decadent. Absinthe Brevans A.O. Spare is €35 from Absinthe.de.

Via Further.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists
• Absinthe girls
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Austin Osman Spare

The White Peacock (1910).

A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds overly-perverse, you haven’t seen his Sweet Snail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying Lorrain was “truly, at the fin de siècle, Sodom’s ambassador to Paris”. Jullian, as I never tire of repeating, wrote the best book on the Symbolist period, Dreamers of Decadence (1971), and that quote reminds me that I ought to track down a copy of his Lorrain biography.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

The Modern Poster by Will Bradley (1895).

A selection from the NYPL Digital Gallery. There’s more by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962) here.

Abstract design based on peacock feathers by Maurice Verneuil (1900?).

Pavo; Lophophorus (1834–1837).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rene Beauclair
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Maison Lavirotte
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé

The 1970 screen adaptation of Dorian Gray by Massimo Dallamano is one film version I’ve yet to see. Given that it’s a production of notorious schlock merchants Samuel Z Arkoff and Harry Alan Towers I wouldn’t expect too much although it does have Helmut Berger as the star when he was at the height of his pulchritude. And I really like this Klimt-esque poster, a typical piece of Seventies design with an illustration that resembles many of the trendier European comic strips of the period. I’ve no idea who the artist was despite there being a scrawled signature. If anyone has a clue, please leave a comment.

• A lengthy review at Cinebeats

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Dorian (Richard Winsor) photographed by Bill Cooper.

Matthew Bourne’s new dance version of Dorian Gray opens today at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, and I’d have been interested in this production even without visions like the ones above and below; the eye candy merely adds an additional frisson and, let’s face it, there’s always been an erotic component to dance and ballet however high-minded the intention. Bourne famously gave the world the a Swan Lake with male swans and in Dorian Gray updates Wilde in a very contemporary manner (following Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation and Duncan Roy’s recent film adaptation) with the gay subtext made an overt text.

Set in the image-obsessed world of contemporary art and politics, Matthew Bourne’s ‘black fairy tale’ tells the story of an exceptionally alluring young man who makes a pact with the devil. Amongst London’s beautiful people, Dorian Gray is the ‘It Boy’ – an icon of beauty and truth in an increasingly ugly world.

The destructive power of beauty, the blind pursuit of pleasure and the darkness and corruption that lie beneath the charming façade; the themes behind Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale have never been more timely.

Richard Winsor again, photographed by Murdo Macleod.

Dorian Gray continues the gender-reversals with Lord Henry becoming Lady H, while Sybil Vane is transmuted to Cyril. I like the stage design detail where the customary nightclub glitterball becomes a version of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, the expensive artworld bauble finding its own level at last as a piece of decoration. Updating stories in this way often provokes a feeling of ambivalence—removing the subtext can have the effect of diluting the tension which lies at the heart of the work—but the continual refashioning of Wilde’s fable has confirmed its status as a contemporary myth, something I’m sure he’d be very pleased about. In that respect, it gives the creator the immortality through art which his creation, in the closing pages of the story, is denied.

• Because Wilde’s worth it | Matthew Bourne discusses the production
• Review in The Independent
• Bill Cooper’s production photos
• Wilde at heart: Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray | Another photo gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Dorian Gray revisited
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…”

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.

The corrupting French novel which Lord Henry Wotton gives to Dorian Gray is never named by Oscar Wilde but its identity is no secret. À Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huymans was published in 1884 and Wilde, Whistler and others were immediately impressed by what amounts to a manual for the lifestyle of a Decadent Aesthete. Wilde fell sufficiently under its spell to have Dorian Gray in the later chapters of his own novel indulge his senses much like Huysmans’ protagonist, Des Esseintes; where Des Esseintes grows poisonous blooms and fills his room with exotic perfumes, Dorian Gray luxuriates over a hoard of precious stones.

À Rebours features lengthy descriptions of Symbolist art, with particular attention given to Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Yet despite the visual description Arthur Zaidenberg’s illustrations are the only ones I’ve come across to date. The book may be influential but it seems too obscure to have attracted illustrators. Zaidenberg’s drawings from a 1931 edition are executed in a woodcut style not far removed from Frans Masereel’s earlier work in books such as Die Stadt (1925), and as such the style is fashionably spare, not necessarily the right choice for a work concerned with sensory delirium. (This Zaidenberg street scene from 1937 shows a definite Masereel influence.) I’d much rather have seen Harry Clarke illustrate Huysmans. Zaidenberg’s drawings are also curious for their foregrounding of the sexual content which makes me think this edition may have been sold on the basis of a salacious reputation. The scene below, for example, doesn’t occur in the novel but can be implied from the description of Des Esseintes meeting a schoolboy in the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg.

“Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship.”

The complete (?) set of Zaidenberg’s illustrations can be seen here. Pages from a later artists’ manual, Anyone Can Draw, are at VTS.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Frans Masereel’s city
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

I wrote recently about John Selwyn Gilbert’s television play, Aubrey, an hour-long drama concerning the artist Aubrey Beardsley. That play was only screened once in 1982 and, like most one-off studio works of the period, is unavailable on DVD. John Osborne’s 1976 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a welcome exception to this neglect and can be acquired in a box set along with three BBC productions of Wilde’s plays and a more recent Wilde documentary.

The plays are decent enough although the cast in the 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest takes some beating. Dorian Gray is the essential work in this collection for me, even if its 100-minute running time cuts the story to the bone. The principal attraction in an entirely studio-bound work with few actors is the leads, and for this we have two great performances from John Gielgud as Lord Henry and Jeremy Brett as artist Basil Hallward. The tragic Dorian is played by Peter Firth who has difficulty keeping up with these heavyweights, especially in the later scenes when the story concentrates more fully on his predicament. Matters aren’t helped by his Yorkshire accent which frequently rises to the surface in a manner that would surely raise eyebrows in Mayfair drawing rooms.

Lord Henry & Basil Hallward admire the portrait.

Lord Henry’s role in Dorian Gray must be a difficult one for an actor since most of his Lordship’s lines are Wilde’s aphorisms delivered as though they’re natural speech. Gielgud pulls this off very adeptly without seeming as though he’s memorised a book of quotations. Jeremy Brett is suitably intense as the obsessed painter in an adaptation which brings to the surface the homoerotic subtext of Wilde’s novel. Lord Henry and Basil Hallward are besotted with their young discovery while Dorian’s later relationship with Alan Campbell is presented quite obviously as a gay affair with all its potential for scandal and ruined reputation. Rumours of similar affairs dogged John Osborne, partly on account of a long friendship with gay actor Anthony Creighton. An earlier play of Osborne’s, A Patriot for Me, also concerned homosexual scandal but Osborne’s interest in these matters seems to have been purely aesthetic and intellectual.

David Gallagher in Duncan Roy’s 2006 adaptation.

More recent adaptations have made the subtext fully explicit by updating the story, among them Will Self’s Dorian, an Imitation, Duncan Roy’s 2006 film (above) and Matthew Bourne’s dance version which is due its premiere in Edinburgh next month. Doing this seems to miss the point in a rather fundamental way. One of the significant frissons of the novel is the way it’s a gay text without saying so outright. In this respect it fulfils Philip Core’s definition of camp, being “a lie which tells the truth”. When the unsaid can be stated quite openly and all loves are free to speak their name, the tension which Wilde creates between “sin” and propriety collapses. Osborne pushes Wilde’s ambiguity as far as he can without seeming absurd or anachronistic.

Hallward’s painting when we get to see it bears a more than passing resemblance to the portrait of artist W Graham Robertson (below) which John Singer Sargent painted in 1894. Sargent was exactly the kind of portraitist Hallward is supposed to be, as well as being included frequently in lists of gay artists. In the BBC production Peter Firth poses in the same heavy overcoat with a cane in his left hand cane as Robertson does. Robertson was 28 at the time but Sargent painted him looking at least ten years younger in what must be the definitive portrait of a fey young aesthete.

W Graham Robertson by John Singer Sargent (1894).

The corrupt condition of the portrait in the final scene doesn’t bear comparison with Ivan Albright’s chilling vision in the 1945 Hollywood version but then few paintings could. As with Aubrey, this play comes from a time when the BBC was happy to commission cheap, small-scale productions and let the actors carry the thing. The attitude today is to try and compete with the film world which means that any period production costs a small fortune and needs inflated values (lots of stars, over-emphatic music and script) in order to justify its cost with foreign sales. Jeremy Brett was fortunate to catch the tail end of this era with his role as Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV productions. A year after Dorian Gray, Judi Bowker, who plays the doomed actress Sybil Vane, took the part of Mina Harker in the BBC’s Count Dracula. Louis Jordan was the Count in that adaptation which, for its fidelity to the novel, still hasn’t been bettered. Count Dracula is also available on DVD which is some consolation if the corporation refuses to treat these works the way they used to. Dramas don’t need hidden portraits to fight the march of time, all they need is a new life on a silver disc.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aubrey by John Selwyn Gilbert
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Dorian Gray revisited
• “The game is afoot!”
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

“Lying on a raised dais, this woman may have been the concubine of an affluent opium smoker.” (1915)

In 1909 the millionaire French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a colour photographic record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn believed that he could use the new Autochrome process, the world’s first user-friendly, true-colour photographic system, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding. More.

More Albert Kahn Autochromes and similar early views in colour at this Flickr pool.

Update: And there’s The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, site and book.

The Palais du Trocadéro from the Eiffel Tower (1912).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Dawn of the Autochrome
• German opium smokers, 1900

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei Eisenstein. The giant decorative heads are quite unique, and I also like the peacock and other mascarons. One can’t help but think that this façade—in a street full of equally detailed façades—would have sustained a lot more attention had it been built in a European capital.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The House with Chimaeras

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

More exterior views.

The interior.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The House with Chimaeras

The classic absinthe poster from 1896 by T Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), one of the best exponents of the post-Mucha style. Don’t let anyone tell you that using unclad women’s bodies in advertising is a new thing.

And a couple more Mucha-esque examples circa 1900, both credited to “Nover”, from the wide selection of absinthe graphics at the Virtual Absinthe Museum.

The printer was L. Revon et Cie, situated in Paris at 93 Rue Oberkampf. The artist’s signature “Nover” is a mystery—no designer by that name is recorded. Since however the word is a palindrome of Revon, the assumption must be that the artist was Revon himself, or alternatively an anonymous employee of the firm. The same artist was responsible for the well-known Absinthe Vichet poster, also printed by Revon et Cie.

Interesting that so many of these posters show the women holding the glasses aloft as though receiving a libation from the gods. Privat-Livemont’s painting adds to the sacred effect by putting a halo behind the absinthe-bearer’s head.

Also at the Virtual Absinthe Museum is this warning against the dangers of the Green Fairy which would make a good addition to the Men with snakes post.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Smoke
• Flowers of Love

Continuing the theme of the fin de siècle feminine, there’s this bizarre (undated) piece by Marcel Lenoir representing…what? A witch? Some demoness? Or woman in general? Considering the often overt misogyny of the period, the latter interpretation is quite possible; there were more than enough artists prepared to see women as the foundation of all evil as well as place them on pedestals. In our post-Freudian age it’s impossible not to do a double-take at a picture of a bare-breasted woman gripping a pair of cocks…

Marcel Lenoir is yet another artist who receives scant attention online but I did find this nice magazine cover from an 1897 number of L’Image. There’s more splendid cover scans here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Divine Sarah
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• Empusa
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• The Masks of Medusa

Sarah Bernhardt by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1895).

You can’t be a fin de siècle fetishist and not develop a fascination with actress Sarah Bernhardt, a woman who was muse to many of the era’s finest artists, most notably Alphonse Mucha, who she employed as her official designer. Mucha’s marvellous posters are endlessly popular, of course; less well-known is the sculpture by academic painter and Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, a rare three-dimensional work inspired by the actress.

Inkwell by Sarah Bernhardt (1880).

Even less well-known is Ms Bernhardt’s own design for a curious bat-winged inkwell. I’ve read of her having created other sculptural works but so far this is the only one I’ve seen a picture of. With something as decadent as this you’d really have to use peacock quills for pens, wouldn’t you?

Bracelet by Alphonse Mucha & Georges Fouquet (1899).

And in a similar sinister vein to the inkwell there’s this serpentine bracelet and ring, a superb one-off, designed by Mucha and crafted by the jeweller Fouquet. After seeing works such as this and the Lalique dragonfly (which Ms Bernhardt once wore), most other jewellery seems timid and unadventurous in comparison.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Smoke
• The Masks of Medusa

La Déstruction.

More Symbolist femmes fatale, this time courtesy of Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926) and his illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal from 1900. I’d had the site these pictures are from bookmarked for some time but hadn’t noticed that the version of Schwabe’s Spleen et Ideal illustration (below) was different to the one more commonly seen in books of Symbolist art. In fact the more common picture is about the only one of these illustrations that turns up at all in books. (It also appeared on a UK edition of Baudelaire’s poems, as I recall.) Schwabe is more usually represented by his mystically-inspired paintings and drawings, especially those he produced for the Salon de la Rose+Croix; on the strength of some of his Baudelairean pieces I’d say he’s a worthy companion to Félicien Rops.

L’Homme et la mer (from Spleen et idéal).

Spleen et idéal (1896).

La Mort des amants.

This picture reminds me of his other, more well-known, representation of death.

The death of the grave-digger (1900).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Empusa
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898
• The Masks of Medusa

The Empusae, we’re told, were daughters of Hecate in Greek mythology, sent to harass the unwary traveller on lonely roads, as if travellers on lonely roads didn’t have enough to worry about from human malefactors. The sinister femme fatale of mythology was a popular subject among fin de siècle artists which perhaps explains why CH Schmidt-Helmbrechts (1871–1936) went to such trouble with this etching of one of the baleful demonesses.

There’s very little information about Schmidt-Helmbrechts on the web and little of his other work to be seen; this picture was scanned from High Art and Low Life: ‘The Studio’ and the fin de siècle (1993) and even there they don’t give a date for it although I’d guess it was a product of the 1890s. The description does say it was printed in olive, however, so I’ve taken the liberty of tinting their black and white version accordingly. I’ve no idea what the musical notes at the bottom left are for but I like the lettering design, there’s almost enough of it to develop into a font.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Philippe Wolfers, 1858–1929
• The Masks of Medusa

Maléficia (1905).

Much of the jewellery and sculpture produced by Phillipe Wolfers demonstrates the tendency of Art Nouveau and decorative Symbolism to evolve from Decadence to full-blown Gothic. The sinister recurs in Wolfers’ creations whether in the form of baleful females such as Malèficia and his Medusa pendant, or in the shape of bats, insects and the ubiquitous fin de siècle serpent. There’s more Wolfers on the web than there was a couple of years ago but still too little; I scanned Malèficia from a book and swiped the bat brooch belt buckle (also a book scan) from Beautiful Century.

Large dragonfly (1903–04).

Le Jour et la Nuit (1897).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• The Masks of Medusa

Today’s book purchase was an edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 1945 by the Unicorn Press, London. It’s rather battered and the spine is stained by some unknown brown fluid that may be blood (which would suit a sanguinary tale such as this) but which is most likely something less dramatic.

The cover is a cropped version of the design drawn by the wonderful Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) for the original Ward, Lock & Co edition of 1891. More about his work below. Ricketts designed and illustrated a number of Wilde’s books and was far closer to Wilde than Aubrey Beardsley, despite the latter’s permanent association with the writer via Salomé. Ricketts’ title design for Dorian Gray was originally lettered in full and the pattern beneath it extended further down the board. The reversed “y” is a unique touch, something I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else.

It’s always a pleasure to find books inscribed by previous owners. The letters beneath Mr Kynnersley’s name in this volume are “R.A.F.” denoting his service in the Royal Air Force. The most poignant book inscriptions are those written from the purchaser to a friend, relative or lover being given the book as a gift. Personal statements of this kind always raise a host of questions as to the identity of the people concerned and, if the book is fairly new, set one wondering how it could be given in such good faith yet sold on so soon after. The Book Inscriptions Project has been encouraging contributions of these personal dedications and I suppose I ought to dig out some of the examples I own and forward them.

One reason for buying this book was the unusual layout of Wilde’s aphoristic preface. Seeing as the cover is a variant of the first edition I wonder if these copy the original printing. Typographic layout today tends to be regimented by the invisible boxes in which the blocks of type are set, meaning that this kind of page design is far less common, especially from major publishers. Books typeset before digital or electronic typesetting also tend to have variable letter spacing throughout, since the type would be set by hand and kerned by eye.

Cover of The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde; design by Charles Ricketts (1894).

And so to Charles Ricketts whose work I’d been intending on writing about earlier. Ricketts and lifelong partner Charles Shannon were two of Wilde’s gay friends whose devotion to art—especially the art of book and magazine design—delighted him. He described their home at no. 1 The Vale, Chelsea, crowded with objets d’art, as “the one house in London where you will never be bored”. Two of his books were designed and illustrated by Ricketts, A House of Pomegranates (1891) and The Sphinx (1894), and Ricketts provided lettering and cover art for other Wilde books besides Dorian Gray. The Sphinx is easily a match for Salomé, despite being overshadowed by that notorious volume initially. In fact it’s arguably the more successful work in terms of pure book design. Beardsley’s antagonism towards Wilde’s text meant that the words and illustrations are frequently at odds, whereas Ricketts’ illustrations are a perfect complement to Wilde’s verse. Ricketts also oversaw the typesetting of the book, something that Beardsley never did. Rickett’s later considered the book to be his best design.

Melancholia; frontispiece to The Sphinx (originally printed in three colours).

Once again it’s necessary to complain that there isn’t a great deal of an artist’s work on the web. The Victorian Web has a few examples of Ricketts’ other work. The best general introduction in book form is Stephen Calloway’s Charles Ricketts: Subtle and Fantastic Decorator (1979), if you can find a copy.

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

So the first book purchase of the year turns out to be the original Dover edition of Beardsley and Wilde’s Salomé. This appeared in 1967, a year after the major V&A exhibition which introduced Beardsley’s work to a new generation and commenced the Beardsley craze that lasted into the Seventies. Not that I’m in desperate need of these drawings, having most of them several times already in different Beardsley books, but this volume is worth having since the reproductions are large size, very sharp and they took enough care to ensure that the uncensored versions of the drawings were used. The book also includes the complete text of Wilde’s play and Robert Ross’s Note on Salomé from 1930 which I don’t have elsewhere.

Beardsley’s work was subject to many censorship actions during his career but the Salomé book caused the most trouble (his later erotic works were private editions so don’t really count). The original title page shown here had the semi-erect penis of the winged boy and the pendulous genitals of the herma removed while one drawing, The Toilette of Salomé, was deemed too much and had to be redrawn entirely. That picture did contain a masturbating page boy so it’s perhaps not so surprising. There was such a lot to offend Victorian sensibilities in Beardsley’s work at this time, whether overt or surreptitious, that it’s remarkable the book was printed at all. His art was so radically different from anything else being done in 1894 that many people had difficulty accepting these pictures as illustrations at all, regardless of the content. As a result they missed salacious details that would have finished the career of a lesser artist. Wilde’s play was equally scandalous and could only be performed in France, having been banished from the London stage. As Robert Ross says in his Note:

Wilde used to say that Salomé was a mirror in which everyone could see himself. The artist, art; the dull, dullness; the vulgar, vulgarity.

The sense of shock extended back to Beardley’s original Salomé drawing (also included in the Dover volume) which appeared in the first number of The Studio in 1893, some of the readers of that magazine finding the detail of the spilled blood nourishing a phallic lily a grotesque detail too far. The Studio drawing was reworked and simplified as The Climax for Salomé. You can see the complete set of illustrations here. Neither that collection nor the Dover book include a picture of the original cover, however, whose splendid gold-on-green peacock feathers look a lot more impressive than Beardley’s rough design. So here it is.

• Download the 1906 US edition of Salomé free at Archive.org

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• “Weirdsley Daubery”: Beardsley and Punch
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The Poet and the Pope

Portrait of Georges Rodenbach by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1895).

Georges Rodenbach’s short, atmospheric novel is one of the key texts of Symbolism, not only for its themes but also for the art it either inspired or complemented. Bruges-la-Morte was first published in 1892 and the recent Dedalus Books edition, edited by Alan Hollinghurst and with a new translation by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, was reprinted late last year.

Bruges-la-Morte…concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the ‘dead city’, becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugue’s obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet’s novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach’s lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.

One of the Bruges-la-Morte photographs.

Bruges-la-Morte was one of the first (the first?) novels to incorporate photographs with the text and any decent edition of the book should always include these. Rodenbach’s novel is usually linked with French Symbolist artist Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer since the two men were friends and the artist produced the well-known portrait of Rodenbach shown above. Lévy-Dhurmer’s drawings and paintings of Bruges are a good match for Rodenbach’s writing, and one his Bruges pieces illustrates the cover of the Dedalus edition.

Bruges—Snow Effect by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1900).

I usually contend, however, that it was another Symbolist artist inspired by Bruges and by Rodenbach’s novel, the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, whose work manages to be even more evocative than Lévy-Dhurmer’s, and consequently more suited to the theme. His touch was lighter and he had a superb ability to convey a sense of stillness and quiet mystery. (Coincidentally but unsurprisingly, both artists produced works entitled Silence.) Khnopff’s curious Abandoned City of 1904 (below), showing the sea flooding a town square, prefigures Surrealism and the haunted vistas of fellow Belgians René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

Bruges-la-Morte by Fernand Khnopff (1892).

Une Ville Abandonnée by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

Dedalus Books has had its existence threatened recently due to proposed Arts Council cuts which would prevent the publisher from financing new translations of decadence and imaginative fiction. I’ve already signed their petition against this and I’d encourage anyone who cares for this kind of work to do the same. And if you’re feeling generous, you could always buy one of their books, of course.

See also:
• Bruges of sighs by Alan Hollinghurst
• Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism

Le Lac d’amour, Bruges by Fernand Khnopff (1904–1905).

Souvenir de Bruges. L’entrée du Béguinage by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

A Bruges. Un Portail by Fernand Khnopff (1904).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Dragonfly woman corsage ornament (1897–1898).
Gold, enamel, chrysoprase, moonstones, and diamonds.

Seeing as dragonflies emerged as a theme this week I can’t resist mentioning my favourite of all, this bizarre confection by glass artist and jeweller René Lalique (1860–1945), a dragonfly with female torso and gryphon claws. This was owned by wealthy Armenian collector Calouste Gulbenkian (in whose museum it now resides) and was worn once by Sarah Bernhardt. You can barely tell from this picture but the delicate gold wings are hinged at several points so they wouldn’t be obtrusive for the wearer.

The Lalique company made more glassware than they did jewellery and these included a range of unique automobile mascots whose pedestrian-puncturing potential saw them banished to museum cabinets as road safety laws evolved. The dragonfly design was an especially splendid example, being placed above a multicoloured disc lit from beneath which rotated in accordance with the speed of the car. The faster the car travelled, the faster the colours changed.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• The glass menagerie

Britannia à la Beardsley by ET Reed (1895).

Pickings grow slim for the dedicated Beardsleyphile after you’ve bought a few books. Despite his prolific career, Aubrey B was dead at 25 and the better collections of his work, especially Brian Reade’s essential monograph, Beardsley (1967), tend to contain almost his entire corpus, juvenilia and all. So you find yourself seeking out the work of his imitators, his successors, and even the weak but not altogether unsuccessful “Nichols” fakes from the 1920s.

Yellow Book parody by ET Reed (1895).

As well as being widely-imitated during his brief lifetime, Beardsley’s work came under fire from the writers and artists at Punch who’d already spent nearly a decade throwing barbs at Oscar Wilde and his circle. “Weirdsley Daubery” was one of a number of plays on Beardsley’s name; “Danby Weirdsley” and “Mortarthurio Whiskerley” were others. The art parodies are mentioned frequently in appraisals but one rarely gets to see examples of them so it’s good to find a couple of websites that have a decent selection. Beardsley’s style was so distinctive it was very easy for the Punch artists to caricature and at least a couple of these are better than the younger artists who were dedicating themselves to copying his work. ET Reed—who seems to have produced the majority of the drawings—and Linley Sambourne were two of the artists involved.

Quid Est Pictura – Veritas Falsa by unidentified artist (1894).

The best copies can be found two thirds down this page. Nice that they give the issue details as well. I’ve seen bound copies of Punch for 1894 and 1895 on many occasions but didn’t realise there was so much Beardsleyesque work in them; now I know what to look out for.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Simplicissimus

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only ones visible from this Flickr collection of Italian cinema memorabilia. As with Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (and Gabriel D’Annunzio’s excessive Salammbô-esque epic, Cabiria), this confirms again that fin de siècle Decadence lived on in the early days of cinema, having been banished (for a time) from the worlds of art and literature.

Via Fabulon. (Thanks Thom!)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932
• Metropolis posters

Advertising poster for Job cigarette papers by Alphonse Mucha (1898).

The law forbidding smoking in public places finally came into effect in England on Sunday, something that the nation’s smokers are still coming to terms with. I’ve never been a smoker but have always been easy-going about the activity, having had smoking parents and been around smokers for years. That said, it’ll be nice to go out now and not return home smelling like an ashtray.

To mark the passing of a nicotine-stained era, here’s a few of the many representations of smoking in the art world. Until I started looking for pictures today I hadn’t realised how many paintings there are of people (and dogs!) having smoke blown in their faces, like this one and this one.

The Opium Smoker by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Noüy.

A Voluptuous Smoke by Charles Edouard Edmond Delort.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Perfume: the art of scent
• German opium smokers, 1900

Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita prefecture (Japan) in 1960. After graduating from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University, he experimented with the Ukiyo-e Pop style. He further refined and developed that style to create his “Heisei Esthiticism” style. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998.

There’s much that’s superficially familiar in Takato Yamamoto’s art—“Boy’s Love” tableaux with fey young men in various states of undress mooning over each other, then the perennial Japanese obsession with naked women bound by ropes. But closer examination reveals a degree of finesse and imagination that elevates his work away from the porn ghetto into the rarified realm of Decadence (as if those favourite Symbolist themes of Saint Sebastian [above] and Salomé [below] weren’t enough of a clue). For a start the drawing style is a great amalgam of influences from Beardsley through to Harry Clarke by way of the finest Edwardian pornographer, Franz von Bayros. Then there’s the curious details of severed heads, claws, sundry bones and eyeballs which decorate the otherwise florid arrangements supporting the figures. So far there don’t appear to have been any books of Takato Yamamoto’s work produced in the west and it’s possible that the sexual content and grotesquery limits that possibility. But you can some galleries here, here and here. His official site is mostly Japanese and has to be navigated from an interior page since there seems to be a file missing from the index.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil
• The Decorative Age

This week’s book purchase (yes, dear reader, it never ends, there are merely lulls between one indulgence of the vice and the next) is a small Bodley Head volume that comprises part of the collected works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), or “Saki” as he’s better known. I have Saki’s complete works already in a big fat Penguin collection but I like these small books that were the common format for portable reading prior to the invention of the paperback. Over a number of years I’ve managed to collect about half of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s complete works which are similarly-sized blue volumes (one in a rare leather binding), simply through chance finds in secondhand shops.

This particular book is a 1929 reprint of The Chronicles of Clovis collection first published in 1911 and, like the Stevenson volumes, has the author’s signature blocked in gold on the cover. The introduction is by AA Milne and I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in full below, partly out of laziness and partly because he does a good job of presenting the man and his work.

THERE are good things which we want to share with the world, and good things which we want to keep to ourselves. The secret of our favourite restaurant, to take a case, is guarded jealously from all but a few intimates; the secret, to take a contrary case, of our infallible remedy for seasickness is thrust upon every traveller we meet, even if he be no more than a casual acquaintance about to cross the Serpentine. So with our books. There are dearly loved books of which we babble to a neighbour at dinner, insisting that she shall share our delight in them; and there are books, equally dear to us, of which we say nothing, fearing lest the praise of others should cheapen the glory of our discovery. The books of “Saki” were, for me at least, in the second class.

It was in the Westminster Gazette that I discovered him (I like to remember now) almost as soon as he was discoverable. Let us spare a moment, and a tear, for those golden days in the early nineteen hundreds, when there were five leisurely papers of an evening in which the free-lance might graduate, and he could speak of his Alma Mater, whether the Globe or the Pall Mall, with as much pride as, he never doubted, the Globe or the Pall Mall would speak one day of him. Myself but lately down from St. James‘, I was not too proud to take some slight but pitying interest in men of other colleges. The unusual name of a freshman up at Westminster attracted my attention; I read what he had to say; and it was only by reciting rapidly with closed eyes the names of our own famous alumni, beginning confidently with Barrie and ending, now very doubtfully, with myself, that I was able to preserve my equanimity. Later one heard that this undergraduate from overseas had gone up at an age more advanced than customary; and just as Cambridge men have been known to complain of the maturity of Oxford Rhodes scholars, so one felt that this Westminster free-lance in the thirties was no fit competitor for the youth of other colleges. Indeed, it could not compete.

Well, I discovered him, but only to the few, the favoured, did I speak of him. It may have been my uncertainty (which still persists) whether he called himself Sayki, Sahki or Sakki which made me thus ungenerous of his name, or it may have been the feeling that the others were not worthy of him; but how refreshing it was when some intellectually blown-up stranger said “Do you ever read Saki?” to reply, with the same pronunciation and even greater condescension: “Saki! He has been my favourite author for years!”

A strange exotic creature, this Saki, to us many others who were trying to do it too. For we were so domestic, he so terrifyingly cosmopolitan. While we were being funny, as planned, with collar-studs and hot-water bottles, he was being much funnier with werwolves (sic) and tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins, had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary man-of-the-world at seventeen, nothing less thrilling than Clovis Sangrail would do. In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if Saki’s careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his, did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter. It may have been so; but, fortunately, our efforts to be funny in the Saki manner have not survived to prove it.

What is Saki’s manner, what his magic talisman? Like every artist worth consideration, he had no recipe. If his exotic choice of subject was often his strength, it was often his weakness ; if his insensitiveness carried him through, at times, to victory, it brought him, at times, to defeat. I do not think that he has that “mastery of the conte”?in this book at least—which some have claimed for him. Such mastery infers a passion for tidiness which was not in the boyish Saki’s equipment. He leaves loose ends everywhere. Nor in his dialogue, delightful as it often is, funny as it nearly always is, is he the supreme master; too much does it become monologue judiciously fed, one character giving and the other taking. But in comment, in reference, in description, in every development of his story, he has a choice of words, a “way of putting things” which is as inevitably his own vintage as, once tasted, it becomes the private vintage of the connoisseur.

Let as take a sample or two of “Saki, 1911.”

The earlier stages of the dinner had worn off. The wine lists had been consulted, by some with the blank embarrassment of a schoolboy suddenly called upon to locate a Minor Prophet in the tangled hinterland of the Old Testament, by others with the severe scrutiny which suggests that they have visited most of the higher-priced wines in their own homes and probed their family weaknesses.

“Locate” is the pleasant word here. Still more satisfying, in the story of the man who was tattooed “from collar-bone to waist-line with a glowing representation of the Fall of Icarus,” is the word “privilege”:

The design when finally developed was a slight disappointment to Monsieur Deplis, who had suspected Icarus of being a fortress taken by Wallenstein in the Thirty Years’ War, but he was more than satisfied with the execution of the work, which was acclaimed by all who had the privilege of seeing it as Pincini’s masterpiece.

This story, The Background, and Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger seem to me to be the masterpieces of this book. In both of them Clovis exercises, needlessly, his titular right of entry, but he can be removed without damage, leaving Saki at his best and most characteristic, save that he shows here, in addition to his own shining qualities, a compactness and a finish which he did not always achieve. With these I introduce you to him, confident that ten minutes of his conversation, more surely than any words of mine, will have given him the freedom of your house.

AA Milne

I often wonder how many people read Saki today. I’ve been reading his stories far longer than those of many other writers for the simple reason that a handful of his works are vaguely supernatural and so were encountered at an early age in ghost story anthologies. Their humour and the author’s unusual name made his work immediately memorable. Saki’s world is essentially the same as that of the still hugely popular PG Wodehouse but, as Milne notes, there’s a cruelty at the heart of Saki one doesn’t find in Wodehouse or other comic authors of the period. Wodehouse’s heroes are usually cheerful buffoons; Saki’s are smart, viciously witty, endlessly self-regarding and sophisticated and always out for themselves. If they can cause chaos among those they despise or find boring, so much the better. The Saki hero lives the same life of idleness as Wooster and company, resentfully dependent on the indulgence of monstrous aunts and other unwanted family members as he flits from London to rambling country mansion and back again. He is vain, deeply snobbish, often misogynist and always very funny.

Clovis Sangrail was merely a new incarnation of Saki’s earlier Reginald, both characters being masks which the author used to describe a smarter, wittier, more handsome version of himself. The Chronicles of Clovis is deceptively titled since Clovis himself is often only a background presence in the stories and, in the oft-reprinted Sredni Vashtar, is entirely absent. In that story a sickly ten-year-old boy plots a devastating vengeance against his hated aunt when she decides to have his pets destroyed. Saki’s life paralleled that of his characters; his mother died from a miscarriage after being charged by a cow (!) so he and his sister were raised by relatives that he grew to despise. Many of these stories can be seen as his bitter revenge.

It’s amusing to read that Saki “may have been homosexual” when so much of his work could hardly have been written by someone who wasn’t. The introduction in the collected Penguin edition is by Noël Coward, and a direct line may be drawn from Oscar Wilde’s characters, through Saki, to Coward’s drawing rooms. Wilde is more generous and philosophical, Coward is more serious (when he wants to be), but all three share a gay writer’s delight in arch wit and sarcastic dismissal. Many of Reginald’s quips could have been borrowed from Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton: “I always say beauty is only sin deep”, “To have reached thirty is to have failed in life.” And Reginald, like Lord Henry, enjoys being scandalous.

“Never,” wrote Reginald to his most darling friend, “be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.”

Thus the opening of Reginald’s Choir Treat, wherein Reginald enlivens his stay in a village by persuading the local choirboys to indulge in a river bathe before marching them naked through the streets in a Bacchanalian procession, playing improvised flutes and singing a Temperance song as they go. Clovis also looks forward to introducing some impressionable youths to poker but that’s as far as we get with active corruption, and little wonder a mere decade after Oscar Wilde’s ignominious trial. Gabriel-Earnest is the werewolf story to which Milne refers but in Saki’s world a wild supernatural creature manifests during the day as a naked teenage boy. In that story Saki’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the werewolf, not with the stuffy adults whose lives he disrupts (or, it should be said, with the working class children that he eats). In The Chronicles of Clovis we have The Music on the Hill, a more serious story that could be described as Machen-light, which sees a youthful and dangerous Pan incarnated in the English countryside. There’s a curious thread of paganism running through Saki’s work which seems deeply-felt, possibly because he preferred animals to most people. The boy in Sredni Vashtar offers up a prayer to his pet ferret and in The Story of Saint Vespaluus Clovis relates the tale of a pagan king’s young nephew who seems to have converted to Christianity but who, after the king has died, admits it was all a joke, and he’s really a serpent-worshipper after all. Clovis describes the boy-saint with some relish, twice telling us how good-looking he was:

…he was quite the best-looking boy at Court; he had an elegant, well-knit figure, a healthy complexion, eyes the colour of very ripe mulberries, and dark hair, smooth and very well cared for.”

“It sounds like a description of what you imagine yourself to have been like at the age of sixteen,” said the Baroness.

“My mother has probably been showing you some of my early photographs,” said Clovis. Having turned the sarcasm into a compliment, he resumed his story.

Saki, like William Hope Hodgson, was too old to enlist when the First World War broke out but he did so anyway and, like Hodgson also, died in a nameless field somewhere in France. Coward speculates how he would have fared had he survived into the Twenties, and he acknowledges Wilde’s precedent along the way:

His articulate duchesses sipping China tea on their impeccable lawns, his witty, effete young heroes Reginald, Clovis Sangrail, Comus Bassington, with their gaily irreverent persiflage and their preoccupation with oysters, caviar and personal adornment, finally disappeared in the gunsmoke of 1914. True, a few prototypes have appeared since but their elegance is more shrill and their quality less subtle. Present-day ideologies are impatient, perhaps rightly, with aestheticism. World democracy provides thin soil for the growing of green carnations, but the green carnations, long since withered, exuded in their brief day a special fragrance, which although it may have made the majority sneeze brought much pleasure to a civilised minority. In this latter group I am convinced that there will always be enough admirers of Saki to keep his memory fresh. I cannot feel that he would have wished for more.

Fortunately for us today his works are easily found online. Project Gutenberg has a number of texts in different formats and this site by a Clovis fan has all the Clovis stories gathered in one place. If you only read one story, go away now and read the two-and-a-half pages of The Open Window. There’s no Clovis or Reginald to be found there but it’s a masterpiece of concision, surprise and wit.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Joe Orton
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

A few drawings by British illustrator John Austen (1886–1948), like Patten Wilson another artist whose work is hard to come by today. Austen was one of the many young illustrators over whom Aubrey Beardsley’s etiolated shadow fell from 1900 onwards and it’s the first ten years of Austen’s work I find most interesting, mainly because of the Beardsley stylings. He’s not as original or as elegant as Harry Clarke but he’s a lot better than the frequently overrated (yet interesting for other reasons) Hans Henning Voight, or Alastair as he preferred to be known.

The first two drawings here are from copies given to me years ago without any details of provenance although the Oriental setting points to illustrations for The Arabian Nights. The Hamlet pictures that follow were from an illustrated edition from 1922. After this Austen’s style changed as the Beardsley look became increasingly unfashionable. While artists such as George Barbier took Aubrey’s innovations in a new Art Deco direction, Austen followed a different trend of stylisation that was very popular among illustrators of the 1930s. His work is less compelling from that point on but I’d still be happy to see a decent collection of his work in book form.

See also:
• Bud Plant’s John Austen page
• John Austen’s Hamlet (better copies than those here which I missed originally)
• John Austen’s ABC of Pen and Ink Drawing (1937)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Austin Osman Spare