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Catalogue of books on the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and Decadents

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38140 Barre, Andre Le Symbolisme - Two volumes Volume 1: Essai Historique sur le Mouvement Symboliste en France de 1885 a 1900; Volume 2: Bibliographie de la Poesie Symboliste. Burt Franklin, New York NY, nd. Facsimile reprint: two volumes, octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and decorations; 702pp. [411pp. + 291pp.], text in French. Mild wear; endpapers and text block edges lightly toned and spotted. No dustwrappers. Very good. Facsimile of 1911 Paris publication. Click here to order $50

39446 Bloy, Leon Lettres a Georges Khnopff Les Editions du Balancier, Liege, 1929. First edition: octavo; paperback; 55pp., text in French. Minimal wear, slight foxing to card covers. Near fine. No. 222 of only 300 copies printed. Click here to order $30

211153 Clutton-Brock, Arthur William Morris Parkstone Press International, New York NY, 2007. Quarto; hardcover, with illustrated boards and decorative endpapers; 255pp., with many colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. Poet, artist, designer and editor, William Morris was a colossal figure in Victorian England, and the inspiration of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, as well as John Ruskin, and was a prime catalyst in his Arts and Crafts movement. Out of respect to the author's original work (of 1914), this text has not been corrected or updated, particularly regarding attribution, dates, and the current locations of works. The information in the captions, however, has been updated. Click here to order $75

213562 Daly, Gay Pre-Raphaelites in Love Ticknor & Fields, New York NY, 1989. Octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in cloth with metallic-green spine titles and decorative endpapers; 468pp., with 16pp. of colour and monochrome plates. Moderate wear; a little shaken; spine extremities softened; text block edges lightly toned and top edge dusted; previous owner's name in ink to the half-title page. Dustwrapper is rubbed and edgeworn; sunned along the spine panel; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. "Behind the dreamlike women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings stood the artists' flesh-and-blood models with whom they often became romantically involved. Dante Gabriel Rossetti transformed shopkeeper Elizabeth Siddal into his saintly Beatrice and slept with barmaid Annie Miller. By marrying teenaged Jane Burden, William Morris tried to seize hold of one of the medieval maidens in his paintings; he projected grace, charm, uncanny wisdom onto her shyness, but she felt emotionally trapped and the marriage broke down. Daly, who has taught women's studies, presents an often touching, sometimes hilarious, always engrossing portrait of the high-minded Victorian Brotherhood, their romances and their almost incestuous cross-connections. The men do not come off well: William Holman Hunt's arrogant attempt to remake flirtatious Annie Miller into a well-read lady reminds one of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth. John Ruskin trivialized and condescended to his wife Effie Gray; she later married sexually demanding John Everett Millais, who made her a breeder in an endless round of pregnancies. This is amorous biography at its witty, perceptive best." - Publishers Weekly Click here to order $24

32252 Delevoy, Robert L. Symbolists and Symbolism Skira; Macmillan, London, 1978. Hardcover folio; blue cloth boards with lower front board and spine gilt titling; 247pp., 83 colour and 228 monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; mildly foxed endpapers and half-title page; very faint spotting to upper text block edges and mild browning to upper rear edge of dustwrapper. Very good to near finer and encased in card slipcase. Symbolism was less a school than the atmosphere of the period. It is this atmosphere and the spirit of the artists who created it, from Vienna to London, that the Belgian art historian Robert L. Delevoy evokes in this comprehensive study of Symbolism. Aided by hundreds of fine reproductions of paintings, watercolours and drawings, the author has succeeded in the difficult task of synthesising the overall significance of this far-reaching movement. Click here to order $100

56279 Eemans, Nestor Fernand Khnopff Le Ministere de L'Instruction Publique, Antwerp, 1950. Small quarto hardcover, 15pp., and 24pp., illustrations in monochrome and frontispiece in colour. Little foxing, wear; near fine in dustwrapper worn at edges; professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. The artist's name in written in pen on the spine section of the wrapper and a number to the top of the inner fold. Click here to order $22

67624 Kaplan, Julius Gustave Moreau Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA, 1974. Quarto hardcover, 146pp., some colour but mainly monochrome illustrations. Lightly spotted text block edges; rubbed dustwrapper with edge and corner wear, chipping and small tear on upper rear edge. Very good otherwise and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. "I believe only in what I cannot see and only in what I feel". Thus the artistic credo of Gustave Moreau, a unique and enigmatic painter preoccupied in his art with the attempt to dissolve the duality of matter and spirit. In the personalised eclecticism of his work, its transcendent poetry is what we admire today, not his absurdly designated place as a decadent painter. The author argues strongly for Moreau to be seen as such an original, and not as a reactionary aesthete working against the fashionable empiricism of the day. Click here to order $30

56280 Khnopff, Fernand Fernand Khnopff Galleria del Levante, Milano, nd. Stapled square octavo catalogue booklet of 35 monochrome prints. Very minor wear, spotting. Very good to near fine. Text in English and Italian. Click here to order $12

218123 Leen, Frederick and others Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, Brussels, 2004. Quarto paperback; 287pp., monochrome frontispiece and many illustrations in colour and b&w. Minor wear only; near fine in protective cover. Exhibition catalogue. Essays on Khnopff and Symbolism, religious themes in his art, his antecedents and peers, theme of the medusa, and his connection with the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie. Click here to order $40

67621 Maas, Jeremy The Victorian Art World in Photographs Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1984. Quarto hardcover, 224pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor scuffing to dustwrapper. Otherwise near fine. This book is without precedent. It is largely based on the author's own collection of photographs of Victorian painters and sculptors with their wives, models, mistresses, dealers and patrons. The collection is the largest in private hands. Anyone who achieved any fame at all in the Victorian era was photographed either for friends or for a ready sale to an eager public. Maas' copiously illustrated album is an excitingly rich visual record of the Victorian art world revealing the artists in full-scale portraiture, at work in their studios, or in informal groupings. An unrepeatable visual feast. Artists included are Palmer, Alma-Tadema, Beardsley, Burne-Jones, Dadd, Millais and Lord Leighton. Click here to order $30

68269 Staley, Allen The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Oxford University Press, London, 1973. Hardcover quarto, xxvi + 193pp., 8 colour, 100 monochrome plates. Preliminaries and text block edges spotted; boards slightly sunned, esp. spine, few small stains; light wear to dustwrapper. particularly edges, backstrip a bit sunned. Wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. The book examines the approach of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their associates to the natural world. It is the first serious examination of the consequences of the Pre-Raphaelite creed of 'exact truth to nature', which led to the ever increasing importance of natural detail in Pre-Raphaelite school of landscape painting. Following a discussion of the developing interest in the precise depiction of nature by the Pre-Raphaelites from 1848 to 1851, chapters on individual artists, many hitherto almost forgotten, trace the history of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape in the 1850s and 1860s and its relation to earlier and later art in England and abroad. Much new light is cast on Ruskin's central role as theorist, patron, and critic of mid Victorian art. Click here to order $50