| Bibliographic references | - Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. London: V & A Publications, 1998. 224pp, illus. ISBN: 1851772197.
- Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279
The entry is as follows:
892
Ex Libris John Lumsden Propert
March 1893
Victoria and Albert Museum (E.293-1972)
Pen, Indian ink and brush over traces of pencil on white wove paper inlaid with window on verso; 7 13-16 x 5 inches (199 x 127 mm); signed and dated.
INSCRIPTIONS: Recto inscribed by the artist in ink at upper left: EX LIBRIS / JOHN / LUMSDEN / PROPERT / [signature device at lower left] / 1893; Verso in pencil: Reduce to half size / Elkin Mathews & John Lane / Bodley [?] / Vigo St. / ‘White [Char?] & Black[?] / 12 ½ x 9 1/9
FLOWERS: Cherry blossom (insincerity), stylised clematis (mental beauty, artifice).
PROVENANCE: Made for Dr Propert by the artist;; Dame Edith Sitwell; Sotheby’s (London) sale 13 December 1961 (71); bt. Colnaghi (London) and Gerstieri; bt. R. A. Harari c. 1962, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum in 1972 with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund.
EXHIBITION: London 1966-8 (397); Tokyo 1983 (63); Munich 1984 (145); Rome 1985 (6.6); London 1993 (104).
LITERATURE: Walter Crane ‘Bluebeard’s Picture Book’ London 1875, ‘The Echoes of Hellas’ London 1887, ‘World’ 25 April 1984 (p.26); ‘Lika Joko’ 12 January 1895 (p. 244); Vallance 1897 (p.206), 1909 (no. 89.viii, where titled ‘Bookplate [designed in 1893] for John Lumsden Propert); Schleusner in Wilde ‘Marchen’ Berlin c. 1910 (frontispiece); Gallatin 1945 (no. 900); Reade 1967 (p. 345, n. 350); Wilson 1983 (plate 9); Heyd 1986 (pp. 37-8); Pruzhan 1986 (plate 152); Smith and Hyde 1989 (p. 84) Zatlin 1990 (pp. 87, 94); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no. 65); Snodgrass 1995 (pp. 267, 270); Zatlin 1997 (pp. 117, 128-9); Samuels Lasner 1998b (no. 35).
REPRODUCED: ‘Yellow Book’, Volume I, 16 April 1894 (p. 251); ‘Early Work’ 1899 (no. 51); Reade 1967 (plate 350); Wilson 1983 (plate 9).
This is one of three drawings Beardsley designed to be used as a bookplate (see nos. 1065, 1077 below). He made it in 1983 for John Lumsden Propert, a highly successful West End physician who was an authority on miniatures (‘History of Miniature Art’ 1887), and he may have borrowed it for this issue of the ‘Yellow Book’. Among other influences, Beardsley’s inspiration for his Pierrots was one created for the stage by Jean-Jaspard Duburau from 1826 to 1846 at the Paris Theatre des Funambules, a theatre taken over from a circus. Duburau gave to the simple clown of the pantomime a complex character that was simultaneously ‘slightly satanic, innocent and tragic, someone outside the normal social world’ (Wilson 1983, plate 9). In this drawing, Beardsley divided the characteristics between the two figures. Pierrot is the innocent and tragic outsider who worships or beseeches attention from the woman. Ignoring him, she maliciously and sardonically glances to her left beyond the frame of the drawing ‘triumphantly aware that she has broken his heart’ (Zatlin 1990, pp. 87, 94). Two borders of dados behind the figures destroy the sense of floor line, and the woman appears to float in air like figures in some Japanese woodblock prints (Zatlin 1997, pp. 128-9). Like the candles on the front and back covers, this candle strikes a note of religious, if blasphemous, ritual. Contemporary writers saw none of these subtleties. The reviewer for the ‘World’ saw only ‘a young man, presumably in a fine frenzy, but actually punching his own head, whose collar is so ill-drawn as to suggest a deformity of jaw’, and nine months later ‘Lika Joko’ spoofed Beardsley’s style in general and the women in this bookplate in particular, in its 12 January 1895 review of Oscar Wilde’s play ‘An Ideal Husband’ (25 April 1894, p. 26; p. 244).
Burne-Jones’s ‘King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid’ (1884, Tate Collection, London), which Beardsley would have seen at the Burne-Jones retrospective in 1892 at the New Gallery, is traditionally accepted as the basis for this drawing. Two religious visual sources for the Pierrot are Mantagna’s ‘Madonna della Vittoria’ (c.1495, Louvre, Paris), in which a young man at the left kneels and looks up in adoration, which Beardsley no doubt saw at the Louvre, and Rossetti’s ‘Mary in the House of St John’ (1858, watercolours in the Tate Collection, London, and Delaware-Bancroft Collection, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE), in which Mary stands over the seated St John. Both take the subject out of a religious context, as does Beardsley. In addition, entreaty disdained is the subject of many works with which Beardsley was familiar. The figural placement is similar to the mortal women in Evelyn De Morgan’s ‘The Angel of Death (I)’ (1880, De Morgan Foundation Collection, London), Walter Crane’s wood-engraving of Bluebeard’s wife begging him not to kill her (Bluebeard’s Picture Book, 1875) and his picture of Pallas Athena in another children’s book, ‘The Echoes of Hellas’, 1887. In contrast to the expressive faces of Crane’s figures, Beardsley makes disdain of Pierrot evident in the woman’s curled lip (Zatlin 1997, p. 117). Beardsley’s memory of the angle of Galatea’s face and Pygmalion’s yearning glance echoes Burne-Jones’s fourth painting, ‘The Soul Attains’ in ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ (1868-78, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, UK), which Beardsley would have seen at the New Gallery’s 1892 Burne-Jones retrospective exhibition and which Malcolm Bell had reproduced in ‘Edward Burne-Jones, A Record and Review’ (1892, p. 96) and the painter’s gouache, ‘The Annunciation (The Flower of God)’ (1862, private collection). The woman’s posture recalls Whistler’s ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother’ (1871, Musee d’Orsay, Paris). In addition, the Pierrot’s yearning look is translated from the figure of the woman inclined towards the angel in G. F. Watts’s plaster sketch and his oil painting ‘Love and Life’ (c.1882, 1884-5, Tate Collection, London), which Beardsley would have seen at Watt’s gallery at Compton when he and Scotson-Clarke visited the painter (see no. 227 above; thanks to David Stewart for pointing out the similarity). The Pierrot’s position is the same as the woman on bended knee in William Hogarth’s painting ‘Marriage A-La-Mode; 5, The Bagio’ (c.1743, National Gallery, London) and in another of his paintings, ‘Scene from the Beggar’s Opera’ (1729-31; Tate Collection, London). Beardsley’s tableau of unrequited love is also based on a condensation of the eight scenes in Aldophe Willette’s 1893 ‘L’Age d’Or’, a pantomime set to music by Claudius Blanc and Leopold Dauphin (BN-Richleau MFICHE N-5529) which portrays the figure of Pierrot trying in every way he can to impress the woman he loves; she ignores him even when he commits suicide. Beardsley transformed Willette’s figures into the worshipful Pierrot who kneels as if he were in a church, an atmosphere undercut by the large woman who ignores her suitor. We see Beardsley’s ‘complicated, ambivalent feeling toward women [and also] a satiric light [cast] upon the theme of love, its religious prototype, and Burne-Jones’s picture [‘King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid’, 1884, Tate Collection, London]’ (Heyd 1986, pp. 37-8).
The influence of this drawing reached Russia within a decade. The disdainful female figure was one influence on the seated woman in a low-cut black gown who knowingly smiles at the viewer in Leon Bakst’s painting ‘The Supper’ (1902; reproduced in Pruzhan 1896, plate 152). In 1910, the Berlin Expressionist artist Thea Schleusner illustrated Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, for which the drawing used as the frontispiece has figures similar to this drawing but in reverse (‘Marchen’ c.1910). Part of this drawing enlarged to 14 ½ x 9 ½ inches (370 x 233 mm) was used in London as the poster for the 1996-8 Beardsley retrospective exhibition. In 1977, the album cover for Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ retains the left/ right arrangement of the male and female figures, but the male stands tall, looking down at the woman who leans on his left leg and arm, and thereby he assumes the dominant position.
A letter from J. Lumsden Propert of 15 January 1897 in the business records of the bookseller Chaucer’s Head, addressed to ‘Dear Sir’, suggests that he offered this bookplate to the proprietor William Downing or perhaps was soliciting his opinion prior to selling the drawing. (I have been unable to discover how or from whom Edith Sitwell, the second owner, acquired the work.) Discussions about Beardsley as a bookplate designer seems to have ensued, and Propert comments, ‘Beardsley’s own bookplate is more curious than beautiful [no. 1065 below]. I do not covet it. There can be no possible harm in asking for anything in this world that I want. It can be refused. I believe mine is the only one he has done, except his own’ (Birmingham City Archives, MS 1366/B/6/349; in 1897 Herbert J. Pollitt owned ‘Beardsley’s own bookplate’ design). For further comment on the figure of Pierrot in Beardsley’s work, see no. 262 above.
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