[Rossetti] Beerbohm, Max / [Jack “Bohun” Lynch].

Rossetti and his Circle [Association Copy – Inscribed / Signed by Max Beerbohm to his friend, Biographer and fellow Caricaturist, “Jack [Bohun] Lynch”].

First Edition. London, William Heinemann, 1922. Quarto. Frontispiece, IX, [1] pages with 23 tipped-in plates (including the now famous Oscar Wilde – Caricature) with lettered tissue-guards. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket. The dustjacket very poor and fragmented but the Volume itself in excellent, firm condition. All colour-plates iwith tissue-guards in place and in wonderful condition. Excellent association-copy with the personal inscripton by Max Beerbohm to his friend Jack Lynch: “Jack Lynch”

Rossetti and His Circle is a book of twenty-three caricatures by English caricaturist, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm. Published in 1922 by William Heinemann, the drawings were Beerbohm’s humorous imaginings concerning the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, the period, as he put it, “just before oneself.” The book is now considered one of Beerbohm’s masterpieces.

Beerbohm returned to England from his home in Rapallo in Italy so that he could study photographs of the subjects he depicted in his caricatures. During the winter of 1917 he rented a cottage in the English countryside near the home of his friend William Rothenstein so that he could work on his Rossetti drawings. Every day, carrying his portfolio of drawings with him, Beerbohm walked across the snow to visit Rothenstein. “No wonder Max was nervous of leaving his Rossetti caricatures in an empty cottage… What a remarkable reconstruction of a period!” Rothenstein later wrote. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had captured Beerbohm’s imagination. “In London, in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, rich, drab, industrial complacency,” he wrote, “Rossetti shone, for the men and women who knew him, with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog. And so he still shines for me.″

Beerbohm’s caricatures include Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his sister Christina, John Ruskin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Holman Hunt, John Millais and George Meredith. In plate 22, Oscar Wilde, on his 1882 lecture tour in America, describes the delights of the Aesthetic Movement to a fascinated audience. This tour had been organised by Richard D’Oyly Carte to publicise the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience.
Sir Hugh Walpole bequeathed Beerbohm’s original watercolour artwork for Rossetti and His Circle to the Tate Collection in London in 1941. A special limited edition of 380 numbered copies bound in white cloth was also published in 1922. These were signed by Beerbohm. (Wikipedia)

The tipped-in Colour-Plates in this publication are furnished with lettered tissue-guards.

We are listing here each of the Illustrations and the text-accompanying them:

I – “D.G.Rossetti, precociously manifesting, among the exiled Patriots who frequented his father’s house in Charlotte Street, That Queer Indifference to Politics which marked him in his prime and his decline”

II – “British Stock and Alien Inspiration″

III – “Rossetti’s Courtship – Chatham Place, 1850 – 1860″

IV – “A Momentary Vision that once befell Young Millais″

V – “The sole Remark Likely to have been made by Benjamin Jowett about the Mural Paintings at The Oxford Union:
’And what were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr.Rossetti ?’″

VI – “Spring Cottage, Hampstead, 1860: ‘Coventry Patmore very vehemantly preaches to the Rossettis that a Tea-Pot is not worshipful for its Form and Colour, but as a sublime Symbol of Domesticity’″

VII: An Introduction – Miss Cornforth : “Oh, very pleased to meet Mr.Ruskin, I’m sure″

VIII: “Blue China” [depicting Carlyle and Whistler]

IX: “Woolner at Farringford, 1857” – Mrs.Tennyson: “You now, Mr.Woolner, I’m one of the most un-meddlesome of women; but – when (I’m only asking), when do you begin modelling his Halo ?″

X: “Ford Madox Brown being patronised by Holman Hunt”

XI: “The Small Hours in the Sixties at 16, Cheyne Walk. – Algnernon Reading “Anactoria” to Gabriel and William″

XII: “Rossetti, having just had a Fresh Consignment of “Stunning” Fabrics from that new shop in Regent Street, Tries Hard to Prevail on his Younger Sister to Accept at any Rate one of these and have a Dress made of it from Designs to be furnished by Himself”

XIII: “Rossetti insistently exhorted by George Meredith to come forth into the Glorious Sun and Wind for a Walk to Hendon and Beyond″

XIV: “Mr. William Bell Scott wondering what it is those Fellows seem to see in Gabriel″

XV: “Mr.Browning brings a Lady of Rank and Fashion to see Mr.Rossetti″

XVI: “Rossetti in his Worldlier Days (Circa 1866-1868) leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala″

XVII: “Riverside Scene – Algernon Swinburne taking his great new friend Gosse to see Gabriel Rossetti”

XVIII: “Mr.Morley of Blackburn, on an Afternoon in the Spring of ‘69, introduces Mr.John Stuart Mill”.

XIX: “A Man from Hymettus” [depicting Victorian painter Frederic Leighton]

XX: “Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem ?” [depicting Theodore Watts-Dunton, Frederic Shields and Sir Hall Caine]

XXI: “Mr.____ and Miss _____ nervously perpetuating the Touch of a Vanished Hand” [Charles Augustus Howell and Rosa Corder]

XXII: “The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is heard fro the First Time in the United States of America. Time: 1881. Lecturer: Mr. Oscar Wilde”


Provenance: [Jack] Bohun Lynch (1884-1928)

Bohun Lynch was born in London on 21 May 1884 of Irish parentage. He was educated at Haileybury School and University College, Oxford; during his time at the latter, he boxed as a middleweight and captained the boxing team in his last year. In 1908, he produced Oxford Quips: by a Crank, which presaged his parallel careers as a writer and caricaturist-illustrator. When he gave up a medical career on health grounds, he turned to journalism, becoming Boxing Correspondent for Field & Sport and producing four books on boxing, beginning with The Complete Amateur Boxer in 1913. However, he soon proved to be a writer of breadth. He published the first of seven novels in 1912, and wrote book reviews and articles on antique furniture. He also prepared an edition of letters that he had received from his fellow Oxonian, Robert James Fletcher, written from the South Seas; these were published by Constable in 1923 (probably without Fletcher’s permission).
Lynch was a specialist in caricature: as practitioner, critic and historian. He contributed drawings to numerous periodicals, including the London Mercury and the Quarterly Review, and illustrated Humbert Wolfe’s Lampoons (1925), among other books. A friend of Max Beerbohm, he produced his caricature (Land and Water, 1919), and spent time with him at his home in Rapallo in preparation for Max Beerbohm in Perspective (1921). (His later guidebook, The Italian Riviera (1923), may have been engendered at this time.) He established his longer view of the subject in the well-regarded A History of Caricature (1926) and an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a member of the Savage Club, he mixed widely with artists and writers. Towards the end of his life, Lynch lived in his ancestral home in North Devon, with his wife and two children. He died in London on 2 October 1928. (Source: Chris Beetles Gallery Homepage)

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Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Art – Rare · Caricature · Caricature Collection · Catalogue Four – International Art · Inscribed · Signed
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31906AB

EUR 1.280,--