SOME CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH ARTISTS.
[London:]: Birrell and Garnett, Ltd., 1921. Small pamphlet in card wrappers, the cover is designed by Duncan Grant. Eight pages of text, contents page, and twenty-two unnumbered leaves of plates, printed on rectos only. Some scattered foxing to text block, slight crease to prelims, very scarce or no foxing to the illustrations due to their being on printed on glossy paper, dusty wrappers rubbed at spine and edges, some math calculations on lower panel. The book plate of the Bloomsbury / Hogarth Press collector William Beekman on the verso of the upper wrapper, else good or better copy of this influential publication which is scarce in commerce.
First edition. David Garnett and Francis Birrell ran a bookshop at 19 Taviton Street, W.C. I, in London quite near the British Museum during the 1920s. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, "Bunny" Garnett received literary recognition when his novel ''Lady into Fox,'' an allegorical fantasy, was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He later founded, with Francis Meynell, the Nonesuch Press. Garnett was intimately involved in the lives of several of the artists represented in this illustrative pamphlet, including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. He was Grant's lover while living with him and Vanessa Bell at the Charleston farmhouse; he later married the daughter of the union of Grant and Bell, Angelica. Other artists represented in this catalogue are Roger Fry, Mark Gertler, Bernard Adeney, George Barne, and Keith Baynes, among others. Garnett wrote the novel ''Aspects of Love'' (1955), on which the 1989 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical was based.
"One of the clearest expositions of the principles underlying modern art is the preface of 'Some Contemporary English Artists,' a little volume which reproduces a score of paintings by British artists of the radical school. The reproductions are excellent and show how living the modern British school is." -- Hamilton Easter Field, Publisher and Editor, The Arts, Vol. 1 No. 5, May. 1921, p.58 (Volume available elsewhere on this website).
OCLC: 5913463. Item #357
Price: $150.00