£600 - £800
Beardsley (Aubrey), a set of eight engravings to illustrate Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Beardsley's fin-de-siècle erotic masterpiece.
The first edition of Lysistrata was published in 1896 in an edition of only 100 copies, with several subsequent pirated editions, and a collotype reissue of the plates in 1929. Beardsley remarked in a letter 'I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done'.
'Beardsley had studied Greek vase painting in 1894 at the British Museum, and the Lysistrata drawings reflect something of the Greek vase spirit, including the bawdiness, without perhaps much of the spontaneity of Greek draughtsmanship. The absence of backgrounds, as in the Salome illustrations, makes the designs of closed outlines and bold dots and rare decorated blacks, all the more dramatic' (Reade). Lasner 107; Ray 318; Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, pp.360-361.
Condition: mount staining, some light foxing on some prints
Christie's label en verso
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