42
‘I THINK THAT IT IS VERY GOOD, AS A PHOTOGRAPH’ — COSTER’S CELEBRATED PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT OF LAWRENCE 157. LAWRENCE, Thomas Edward — Howard Sydney Musgrave COSTER (photographer). ‘T.E. Lawrence’.
£1,950
Vintage silver gelatin photographic print on textured paper (314 x 245mm), with pencilled number ‘9’ on lower margin; slight offsetting [?from earlier mount] on the outer margins and small surface loss on the blank verso, possibly caused by mounting, some very light oxidisation of emulsion, nonetheless a very good example of Coster’s celebrated portrait of Lawrence.
The photographer Howard Coster (1885-1959) established his studio in London in 1926, and quickly became well-known for his literary portraits, which included photographs of John Galsworthy, J.B. Priestley, A.A. Milne with his son Christopher Robin Milne and Pooh Bear, Siegfried Sassoon, and M.R. James. In a letter to Charlotte Shaw on 14 October 1931, Lawrence describes how this famous portrait was taken by Coster: ‘On Friday I was on the embankment near the Temple [...] A little bare-headed man rushed up and said “Colonel Lawrence?” “Use to be”, I replied. “I want to photograph you”. “But who are you?” I asked. “My name is Howard Coster”. “A professional?” I asked. “Yes, but this is for myself. I don’t want to sell it or show it. You and Gandhi are the two people I want to take”. So I went along, for the joke of it, and he put me on a little chair, made me take my tunic off, and photographed me about a dozen times. A little shop in Essex Street. Rather a nice little stammering man, I thought. Works for Vogue!’ (M. Brown (ed.), The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (London: 1988), pp. 458-459). Two weeks later Coster sent Lawrence one of the photographs he had taken, and Lawrence wrote to his mother on 30 October 1931 expressing his appreciation of the portrait: ‘Pity it is so large, for I think that it is very good, as a photograph’ (The Home Letters of T.E. Lawrence and his Brothers (Oxford: 1954), p. 379).
As Terence Pepper and Susanna Brown comment in their ODNB article on Coster, his ‘portrait of Lawrence of Arabia became an iconic image, appearing in the Photography Year Book, 1936- 1937 and the Illustrated London News, after Lawrence’s death. It was also exhibited in Photography of 100 Years at the Science Museum in 1939, and in the premises of Kodak Ltd,
West Street, Durban, South Africa, alongside Coster’s portraits of Aldous Huxley, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Eric Gill’. The photograph seems to have been available in two formats: one printed on smooth stock, measuring circa 243 x 168mm, and this larger format, printed on textured paper; five copies are recorded by Anglo-American auction records since 1975, but only one — which was from the collection of Eric Kennington — was in this larger format and on textured paper (Sotheby’s London, 15 November 2005, lot 146).
Cf. J. Wilson, T.E. Lawrence (exh. cat.), no.315.
WITH THE SCARCE AND EPHEMERAL LAWRENCE OF ARABIA MEMORIAL PAMPHLET
158. LAWRENCE, Thomas Edward. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A Triumph. [Edited by A.W. Lawrence.] London: The Alden Press for Jonathan Cape, 1935.
£95
4to (253 x 190mm). Original brown buckram by A.W. Bain & Co., Ltd, spine lettered in gilt, upper board blocked in gilt with crossed sword design, top edges brown, others uncut; pp. 672; frontispiece and 47 photogravure plates by John Swain & Son after Augustus John, Eric Kennington, Lawrence, and others, 4 folding maps printed by The Chiswick Press, Ltd in red and black and bound to throw clear; a few light marks or indentations on boards, short cracks on upper hinge, occasional light spotting, otherwise a very good copy; provenance: A.P. [?]Downie, October 1949 (ownership inscription on front free endpaper). Third English and first published edition, third impression with the illustrations on pp. 304 and 305 correctly located in ‘Illustrations’. O’Brien A042. [With, loosely inserted:]
[LAWRENCE OF ARABIA MEMORIAL COMMITTEE]. Lawrence of Arabia Memorial. [[?]London: Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Committee, August 1935.] 12mo (193 x 113mm). 3pp., printed on a bifolium; a few, very light spots and short (c. 3mm) tear on lower l., otherwise a very good example. O’Brien E068.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom was first printed in 1922 in an edition of eight copies intended for Lawrence’s use, of which only six copies survive intact; the ‘Subscribers’ or ‘Cranwell’ edition then followed in 1926, published privately in an edition of circa 211 copies and, as Lawrence wrote to Sotheran’s on 24 April 1925, ‘this thing is being given only to my friends and their friends. No copies are for sale’; and finally, after Lawrence’s death in May 1935, the text was published in a trade edition by Jonathan Cape in July 1935. Such was the book’s popularity that the first impression of 60,000 copies was quickly exhausted and second, third and fourth impressions were printed in the following month (August 1935).
This copy also includes the scarce and ephemeral Lawrence of Arabia Memorial leaflet, issued in August 1935 by the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Committee, which was formed very shortly after Lawrence’s death to raise funds for a bronze memorial bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington to be placed in St Paul’s Cathedral. The appeal was signed by Field Marshall Allenby, Herbert Baker, Winston Churchill, Lionel Curtis, Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, and Evelyn Wrench.
THE FINELY-PRINTED FIRST EDITION OF A ‘MAJOR COLLECTION OF LETTERS BY LAWRENCE’
159. LAWRENCE, Thomas Edward. Letters to E.T. Leeds, with a Commentary by E.T. Leeds. Edited and with an Introduction by J.M. Wilson with a Memoir of E.T. Leeds by D.B. Harden & Illustrated with Line Drawings by Richard Kennedy. Andoversford: The Whittington Press, 1988.
£450
4to (282 x 200mm). Original cloth-backed ochre boards by The Fine Bindery, spine lettered in gilt, upper board with design after Kennedy, top edges coloured ochre, original slipcase; pp. xxii, [2 (editorial note, verso blank)], 140, [4 (colophon and 3 blank pp.)]; mounted photographic frontispiece, 10 illustrations after Richard Kennedy printed in ochre, 9 full-page, illustrations in the text, 6 plates bearing illustrations recto-and- verso, some after Lawrence, title printed in brown and black; slipcase very slightly rubbed and scuffed, otherwise a fine copy, without the loosely- inserted errata slip by J.M. Wilson, 1990, found in some copies but not noted by either Butcher or O’Brien.
First edition, limited to 750 copies, this no. 205 of 650 bound in quarter buckram. A ‘major collection of letters by Lawrence [... which] are especially revealing of the Carchemish period’ (O’Brien), comprising fifty-three letters from Lawrence to Leeds (the Assistant to the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), dating from 1909 to 1935, and relating principally to archaeological matters (some thirty-six were written from Carchemish): ‘This new information is interesting enough in itself — but it is also extremely important in other ways. First, because it sheds new light on the early relationship between Lawrence and D.G. Hogarth, and, second, because it makes nonsense of the reasons suggested by some biographers for Lawrence’s appointment to the British Museum’s Carchemish excavations. The evidence is therefore immensely important’ (J.M. Wilson, quoted in the prospectus for the work).
D. Butcher, The Whittington Press (Leominster: 1996), 94; O’Brien A263.
160. LE MOYNE DE MORGUES, Jacques. Portraits of Plants. Victoria and Albert Museum. [n.d., c. 1980].
£35
Small 4to. Original boards and wrapper; pp. 44, illustrated throughout in colour; fine.
First edition. A reproduction of the V&A’s siginificant collection of botanical illsutrations by the Huguenot master Jacques Le Moyne (1533-1588).
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