Original illustration: cover design for The Story of the Iliad
No place: 1905. Ink on board with paper collage elements, white gouache and graphite around lettering, image measuring 9.5 x 6.25 inches on board measuring 12.5 x 8 inches. Moderate foxing, light smudging. With: Church, Alfred J., The Story of the Iliad (London: Seeley & Co. Ltd., 1905). Single volume, measuring 6.75 x 4.25 inches: 160. Original dark blue pictorial cloth stamped in gilt, patterned endpapers, all edges gilt. Illustrations throughout text. Owner signature to front free endpaper, light shelfwear.
Original pen and ink design after John Flaxman, produced for the decorative publisher’s binding of Alfred J. Church’s The Story of the Iliad. Flaxman’s eighteenth-century illustrations for the Iliad and the Odyssey, inspired by ancient Greek vase painting, defined popular English neoclassicism. His refined line drawings would be reproduced, pirated, and imitated in countless later editions. This unsigned cover design, created for the 1905 reprint of Church’s Victorian prose translation, sympathetically adapts Flaxman’s iconic image of Homer invoking the Muse. A compelling original drawing, testament to the enduring appeal of Homer and his interpreters, offered with a copy of the published book.
Price: $650.00