WALTER SICKERT: A CONVERSATION.
Tavistock Square, London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1934. Small octavo. Stiff pale duck-egg blue paper sewn wrappers, lettered in black; 32pp. Illustration of a dinner table on upper panel by Vanessa Bell. Slight rubbing at shelf-edge, light finger smudge to lower panel, else very good. From the collection of R. O. Blechman, an American animator, illustrator, children's-book author, graphic novelist and editorial cartoonist whose work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions.
First separate edition, one of 3800 copies printed. The essay was first published in the Yale Review, September 1934 as "A Conversation About Art" and reprinted in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays and in Collected Essays, Vol. 2. In this separate edition, and in the others listed, the text is slightly revised from the Yale Review publication. Woolf, in a "Sunday 26th Nov [1933]" letter she writes to her nephew Quentin Bell, "... I'm involved with your friend Sickert. I went to his show, and was so much impressed that Nessa [Vanessa Bell] made me write to him; and he said 'Do me the favour to write about my pictures and say you like them.' 'I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters. Do be the first to say so' he says. I rather think of trying. Nessa is going to take me to tea with him. Do you think one could treat his paintings like novels?" -- Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five 1932-1935, p.253.
KIRPATRICK A20a. WOOLMER 355.
. Item #403
Price: $150.00