Le Morte DArthur
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Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte DArthur. J. M. Dent & Co: London, 1893-4.
Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
According to the art critic Haldane Macfall, a fortuitous encounter in a Cheapside bookshop between would-be artist Aubrey Beardsley (b. 1872, d. 1898) and publisher John M. Dent resulted in one of the most sumptuous and iconic editions of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of the Victorian Arthurian Revival, and indeed of modern times.
Beardsley, who worked as an insurance clerk in London, frequented the nearby Jones and Evans' bookshop on Queen Street. He befriended one of the owners, Frederick Evans, to whom he would show his drawings. In 1892 the publisher Dent was also in the bookshop, and told Evans about his search for an innovative artist to illustrate a new publishing venture.
Dent had decided to produce an edition of Malory's Arthurian masterpiece, the Le Morte D'Arthur, in his aim of publishing beautiful yet affordable classics to rival the expensive editions produced by William Morris' Kelmscott Press. The story goes that Dent was telling Frederick Evans about this when Beardsley happened to enter the bookshop. "There's your man!" said Evans.
After offering a sample illustration, to which Dent responded enthusiastically, Beardsley produced nearly 500 black-and-white drawings for the book. Some were fairly radical – vastly different to representations of Arthuriana that had come before:
…some of the full-page illustrations, such as "The Lady of the Lake Instructing Arthur About Excalibur" conform to standards typical of the Arthurian Revival, others subvert that standard through nudity, androgyny, and violence. More often than not, Beardsley stripped the heroes of their strength and nobility, presenting them reclining, sleeping, or dominated by women.
(The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 241-42)
The book was published with a limited print run of 1,800 copies (300 printed on Dutch handmade paper, and 1,500 ordinary copies – this copy is one of the latter).
This was Beardsley's first commissioned work as an artist. It allowed him to leave his insurance role to pursue his artistic talents, and he went on to become an important figure in the Art Nouveau movement.
He died of tuberculosis in 1898, just four years after completing the illustrations for Dent's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is still one of the most iconic and recognisable Arthurian editions of the modern period.
Note:
The information on this label is indebted to another beautiful book held in the E. R. Harries Arthurian Collection:
Haldane Macfall. Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work. John Lane and the Bodley Head Limited: London, 1928.
See also The Arthurian Handbook, 2nd ed. Eds Norris J. Lacy, Geoffrey Ashe, Debra N. Mancoff. Routledge: New York and Abingdon, 2013. pp. 240-243.