SPARE, Austin Osman. A Book of Satyrs.
London: The Co-Operative Printing Society, 1907
£ 5,000
Folio (440 x 327mm), pp. [32], with 12 full-page illustrations and many other smaller illustrations, with 3 loosely inserted contemporary leaves containing an advertisement, a notice, and an order form. Edges uncut, light offsetting and browning not affecting illustrations, only around the edges. Illustrations clean and bright. Original parchment-backed boards with title, author and illustration in black to front cover, with some light soiling but in overall excellent and solid condition.
Very rare first edition signed by Austin Osman Spare, an unnumbered copy of a limited edition of 300. A Book of Satyrs reproduces 12 full-page illustrations intended to depict a series of ‘satires’, including: ‘The Church’, ‘Intemperance’, ‘Officialism’, Fashion, ‘Existence’, and ‘Quakery’. In its introduction, James Guthrie writes that ‘Spare continually achieves the unexpected; his pattern is always original; his characteristic line is of fine nervous quality; his types are powerfully visualised.’. Signed copies of this work are very rarely seen on the market, this being the only one currently offered.
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was an enfant terrible at the Royal College of Art, from where he dropped out in 1905, without completing the course. ‘The same year, aged eighteen, he published his first book, Earth: Inferno. His first West End showing at the Bruton Galleries in 1907 was widely condemned as unhealthy, and George Bernard Shaw is alleged to have said that ‘Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man’ (K. Grant, Images and oracles of Austin Osman Spare (1975), p.16). […] Spare’s work often featured pagan and occult imagery such as satyrs and witches, but his portraits and nudes have a less circumscribed appeal. He was a draughtsman of exceptional power, and some of his work has an almost Pre-Raphaelite degree of finish. His skills enabled him to produce remarkably separate styles, and he was popularly compared at different times with Beardsley, Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. […] Misleadingly promoted as a proto-surrealist, or pigeon-holed as an Edwardian decadent, Spare was a maverick artist whose best work carries an exceptional charge.’ (ONDB)
Provenance
Hugh Walpole’s copy, with his Brackenburn bookplate (burgundy thick paper with gilt monogram) to front pastedown.