{"meta":{"version":"2.1","_links":{"self":{"href":"https://api.vam.ac.uk/v2/object/O685616"},"collection_page":{"href":"https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O685616/"}},"images":{"_primary_thumbnail":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GA5121/full/!100,100/0/default.jpg","_iiif_image":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GA5121/","_alt_iiif_image":[],"imageResolution":"high","_images_meta":[{"assetRef":"2013GA5121","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2018LG6407","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false}]},"see_also":{"_iiif_pres":"https://iiif.vam.ac.uk/collections/O685616/manifest.json","_alt_iiif_pres":[]}},"record":{"systemNumber":"O685616","accessionNumber":"E.304-1972","objectType":"Drawing","titles":[],"summaryDescription":"","physicalDescription":"A drawing in black ink depicting a stylised design for the front cover of 'The Rape of the Lock' by Alexander Pope. In the centre of the image enclosed in an oval looking glass is a delicately decorated pair of scissors, open, about to cut a lock of hair that is suspended above. Either side of the oval there are elaborate candelabra formed of scrolling leaf-like forms.","artistMakerPerson":[{"name":{"text":"Aubrey Beardsley","id":"A8134"},"association":{"text":"artist","id":"AAT25103"},"note":""}],"artistMakerOrganisations":[],"artistMakerPeople":[],"materials":[{"text":"Paper","id":"x30308"}],"techniques":[{"text":"drawing","id":"AAT54196"}],"materialsAndTechniques":"Pen and ink on paper","categories":[{"text":"Drawings","id":"THES48966"},{"text":"Illustration","id":"THES48938"},{"text":"Designs","id":"THES48968"},{"text":"Books","id":"THES48986"}],"styles":[],"collectionCode":{"text":"PDP","id":"THES48595"},"images":["2013GA5121","2018LG6407"],"imageResolution":"high","galleryLocations":[{"current":{"text":"EXH2","id":"THES265485"},"free":"","case":"","shelf":"","box":""}],"partTypes":[[{"text":"drawing","id":"AAT33973"}]],"contentWarnings":[{"apprise":"No","note":""}],"placesOfOrigin":[{"place":{"text":"London","id":"x28980"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":""}],"productionDates":[{"date":{"text":"1896","earliest":"1896-01-01","latest":"1896-12-31"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":""}],"associatedObjects":[],"creditLine":"Purchased with Art Fund support","dimensions":[{"dimension":"Height","value":"248","unit":"mm","qualifier":"image to edge of border","date":{"text":"2018","earliest":"2018-01-01","latest":"2018-12-31"},"part":"image","note":""},{"dimension":"Width","value":"176","unit":"mm","qualifier":"image to edge of border","date":{"text":"2018","earliest":"2018-01-01","latest":"2018-12-31"},"part":"image","note":""},{"dimension":"Height","value":"250","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"2018","earliest":"2018-01-01","latest":"2018-12-31"},"part":"sheet","note":""},{"dimension":"Width","value":"178","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"2018","earliest":"2018-01-01","latest":"2018-12-31"},"part":"sheet","note":""}],"dimensionsNote":"","marksAndInscriptions":[],"objectHistory":"This drawing was a design for the front cover of 'The Rape of the Lock' a heroicomical poem in five cantos written by Alexander Pope, embroidered with nine drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, published by Leonard Smithers, London, May 1896.\r\n\r\nAccording to Stephen Calloway, with regards to Beardsley's illustrations of 'The Rape of the Lock', in his book <u>Aubrey Beardsley</u>, London: V&amp;A Publications, 1998, p. 159: 'Staring with [Alexander] Pope, Beardsley immediately planned a de luxe volume with a dozen full-page 'embroideries' and other incidental illustrations. Smithers was happy to take on the idea, and Beardsley worked quickly, completing half the drawings in London and then finishing the set in Paris. Considered by many critics to be his greatest book, the pictures are drawn with a staggering mastery of the coolly controlled hatched-line technique that Beardsley derived from close study of the old engravers. As book illustrations they exhibit a strange, yet highly successful blend of almost static, hieratic intensity, linear opulence, and, at the same time a vivid dramatic and narrative quality, all of which contrive in different ways to echo Pope's highly mannered language and satirical characterisation.'","historicalContext":"","briefDescription":"Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, design for the front cover of 'The Rape of the Lock', a heroicomical poem in five cantos written by Alexander Pope, embroidered with nine drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, published by Leonard Smithers, London, May 1896, pen and ink on paper, London, 1896","bibliographicReferences":[{"reference":{"text":"Calloway, Stephen. <u>Aubrey Beardsley</u>. London: V & A Publications, 1998. 224pp, illus. ISBN: 1851772197.","id":"AUTH332149"},"details":"p.152, p. 157, p. 159","free":""},{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279\r\n\r\nThe entry is as follows:\r\n976\r\nCover\r\nBetween December 1895 and late March 1896\r\nVictoria and Albert Museum (E.304-1972)\r\nPen, Indian ink and brush over traces of pencil on white wove paper secured to backing with slotted hinges; 9 7/8 x 7 inches (250 x 178 mm).\r\n\r\nINSCRIPTIONS: Recto in Indian ink at far side of candelabra: A.B.; Verso in pencil: [illegible] / R / d / ordinary line block / 4454 [circled] / reduce to 9 1/2 [crossed out, replaced with]: 4 ½ inches / in length [crossed out] / height / [in black ink]: 270 / [in pencil]: Binding block / for / Smithers / 1 Arundel St. / W.C. [from Binding through W.C. crossed out] / A B / 10 St. James Place / S W / E.304-1972\r\n\r\nPROVENANCE: Leonard Smithers; Christie’s sale 12 January 1900 (124, where described as ‘Cover design for The Rape of the Lock & two others’; bt. Maggs Brothers;...; bt. Yakovleff; bt. Colnaghi (London) on 23 January 1961; bt. R. A. Harari on 24 January 1961, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum in 1972 with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund.  \r\n\r\nEXHIBITION: London 1898 (182); London 1966-8 (505), Tokyo 1983 (87); Munich 1984 (190); Rome 1985 (9.i); London 1993 (113).\r\n\r\nLITERATURE: Vallance 1897 (p.210), 1909 (no. 144.ix); Gallatin 1945 (no. 1033); Reade 1967 (p. 352, n. 403); Brophy 1969 (pp. 18, 20); ‘Letters’ 1970 (pp. 110, 117); Halsbad 1980 (pp. 86-119); Wilson 1983 (plate 47); Eadie 1990 (pp. 71, 196-7, 199, 201); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no. 105); Zatlin 1997 (pp. 51-2); Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998 (p. 245, n. 147)\r\n\r\nREPRODUCED: As front cover, printed on Japanese vellum for the special edition of ‘The Rape of the Lock’, published by Leonard Smithers between 23 April and early May 1896; on tortoise-blue cloth for the ordinary edition published in August and December 1896; ‘Later Work’ 1901 (no. 104, where titled ‘Cover Design’); ‘Best of Beardsley’ 1948 (plate 68); Reade 1967 (plate 404); Halsband 1980 (plate 43); Wilson 1983 (plate 47).\r\n\r\nCommentators on this book design agree that it is ‘a marvellous combination of rococo exuberance and restrained elegance… [like the other drawings] entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book’ and that Beardsley’s elegance is ‘budding, rotund, fruitful - but also disdainful and severe’ (Wilson 1983, plate 47; Brophy 1969, p. 20). Brophy focuses on the shape and purpose of the candlesticks and pillars at left and right; they are ‘budding, twirling rococo candlesticks (in whose flame the sacrificial hair is by implication to be burnt), plus their silhouetted echo in the sides of the frame which consists if one of a pair of fryer candlesticks and of bulbously buttocked female torsos; and the other those inexorable straight, ruled, reduplicated black lines, which visibly act out the shearing and severing deed of the scissors’ (p. 20). Wilson examines the stylistic influences - rococo, abstract, baroque - and the sexual suggestiveness in the design’s interior: the ‘dense network of horizontal and vertical lines contains a dressing table mirror whose numerous candles form part of the surrounding geometry, but whose supports are floridly rococo. The pure oval of the mirror itself reasserts order, but within it a pair of rococo scissors threaten a lock of hair so stylised that it has been seen also as a sea horse or a sperm. Certainly, it forms, together with the V of the open scissors, an emblem of the female public triangle. This entire construction in which order and rococo exuberance are held in tense balance, is in turn contained, or rather framed, by a solid border of curving shapes, baroque rather than rococo in style and which both contrast with the linear grid and throw into even greater relief the rococo structure of the mirror. At the sides these curved forms suggest baroque pillars but they can also be seen as outlining the back and buttocks of generously proportioned female figures’ (Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998, p. 245, no. 147).\r\nZatlin argues that the cover shows Beardsley’s assimilation of Japanese design: the mathematically placed lines demarcating the central panel with its eighteenth-century style candelabra affixed to an oval mirror form a frame of Japanese reeding, seen in the West also in E. W. Godwin’s furniture designs, Rossetti’s cover design for the 1861 edition of Christina’s Rossetti’s ‘Poems’ and Whistler’s frames for some of his paintings. Beardsley’s reeding echoes the straight lines of his candles. Moreover, he combined the elements of this design with deliberate disjunction of size and two-dimensional flatness, techniques prominent in Japanese woodblock prints. The cover design exemplifies Beardsley’s mature style, compounded of Western and Eastern style. Eighteenth-century fashion plates by Moreau le Jeune inspired Beardsley’s ‘keyhole’ effect, for example, and these black overlapping shapes at the border lend depth to the inner design. Although most of his lines are regularly spaced and straight, like Japanese print designers, he did not spatially congest the design; he radically;y simplified the dense ornament, and he left uncluttered space around the scissors and candles. To create a cover serene in overall design that emphasises the poem’s subject, the lock of hair and scissors, he offset hard-edged with curved strokes, realistic with abstract pattern, black masses with blank areas, repeating these shapes with a Western geometrical regularity (Zatlin 1997, pp. 51-2). The shapes ‘with their symbolism and ambiguities’ prepare the way for the poem’s drama (Halsband 1980, p.91). Unusually, this cover design was reproduced inside the Bijou edition of 1897 for which Beardsley designed a fresh cover (no. 986 below).\r\nIn turn, Beardsley influenced the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a member of the group known as the Glasgow Four. They appropriated Beardsley’s sweeping line from ‘Le Morte Darthur’, beginning with the publication of part one in June 1893, soon after which it became explicit in their work, and they publicly acknowledged their connection with Beardsley in November 1894 (Eadie 1990, pp. 71, 196-7, 199, 201). Mackintosh's 1896 architecture and interior for Miss Cranston’s Buchanan Street Tearooms, Glasgow, designed in collaboration with George Walton, reverberates with Beardsley’s line. In this restaurant, Mackintosh softened angular doors and mirrored walls by applying lead in mathematically placed but flowing lines regularly pierced by coloured ovals and enlarged Beardsleyan roses. The entire room similarly plays with hard-edged geometric shapes against rounded lines, creating an effect comparable to Beardsley’s cover for this book.    "},{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279\r\n\r\nThe entry is as follows:\r\n976\r\nCover\r\nBetween December 1895 and late March 1896\r\nVictoria and Albert Museum (E.304-1972)\r\nPen, Indian ink and brush over traces of pencil on white wove paper secured to backing with slotted hinges; 9 7/8 x 7 inches (250 x 178 mm).\r\n\r\nINSCRIPTIONS: Recto in Indian ink at far side of candelabra: A.B.; Verso in pencil: [illegible] / R / d / ordinary line block / 4454 [circled] / reduce to 9 1/2 [crossed out, replaced with]: 4 ½ inches / in length [crossed out] / height / [in black ink]: 270 / [in pencil]: Binding block / for / Smithers / 1 Arundel St. / W.C. [from Binding through W.C. crossed out] / A B / 10 St. James Place / S W / E.304-1972\r\n\r\nPROVENANCE: Leonard Smithers; Christie’s sale 12 January 1900 (124, where described as ‘Cover design for The Rape of the Lock & two others’; bt. Maggs Brothers;...; bt. Yakovleff; bt. Colnaghi (London) on 23 January 1961; bt. R. A. Harari on 24 January 1961, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum in 1972 with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund.  \r\n\r\nEXHIBITION: London 1898 (182); London 1966-8 (505), Tokyo 1983 (87); Munich 1984 (190); Rome 1985 (9.i); London 1993 (113).\r\n\r\nLITERATURE: Vallance 1897 (p.210), 1909 (no. 144.ix); Gallatin 1945 (no. 1033); Reade 1967 (p. 352, n. 403); Brophy 1969 (pp. 18, 20); ‘Letters’ 1970 (pp. 110, 117); Halsbad 1980 (pp. 86-119); Wilson 1983 (plate 47); Eadie 1990 (pp. 71, 196-7, 199, 201); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no. 105); Zatlin 1997 (pp. 51-2); Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998 (p. 245, n. 147)\r\n\r\nREPRODUCED: As front cover, printed on Japanese vellum for the special edition of ‘The Rape of the Lock’, published by Leonard Smithers between 23 April and early May 1896; on tortoise-blue cloth for the ordinary edition published in August and December 1896; ‘Later Work’ 1901 (no. 104, where titled ‘Cover Design’); ‘Best of Beardsley’ 1948 (plate 68); Reade 1967 (plate 404); Halsband 1980 (plate 43); Wilson 1983 (plate 47).\r\n\r\nCommentators on this book design agree that it is ‘a marvellous combination of rococo exuberance and restrained elegance… [like the other drawings] entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book’ and that Beardsley’s elegance is ‘budding, rotund, fruitful - but also disdainful and severe’ (Wilson 1983, plate 47; Brophy 1969, p. 20). Brophy focuses on the shape and purpose of the candlesticks and pillars at left and right; they are ‘budding, twirling rococo candlesticks (in whose flame the sacrificial hair is by implication to be burnt), plus their silhouetted echo in the sides of the frame which consists if one of a pair of fryer candlesticks and of bulbously buttocked female torsos; and the other those inexorable straight, ruled, reduplicated black lines, which visibly act out the shearing and severing deed of the scissors’ (p. 20). Wilson examines the stylistic influences - rococo, abstract, baroque - and the sexual suggestiveness in the design’s interior: the ‘dense network of horizontal and vertical lines contains a dressing table mirror whose numerous candles form part of the surrounding geometry, but whose supports are floridly rococo. The pure oval of the mirror itself reasserts order, but within it a pair of rococo scissors threaten a lock of hair so stylised that it has been seen also as a sea horse or a sperm. Certainly, it forms, together with the V of the open scissors, an emblem of the female public triangle. This entire construction in which order and rococo exuberance are held in tense balance, is in turn contained, or rather framed, by a solid border of curving shapes, baroque rather than rococo in style and which both contrast with the linear grid and throw into even greater relief the rococo structure of the mirror. At the sides these curved forms suggest baroque pillars but they can also be seen as outlining the back and buttocks of generously proportioned female figures’ (Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998, p. 245, no. 147).\r\nZatlin argues that the cover shows Beardsley’s assimilation of Japanese design: the mathematically placed lines demarcating the central panel with its eighteenth-century style candelabra affixed to an oval mirror form a frame of Japanese reeding, seen in the West also in E. W. Godwin’s furniture designs, Rossetti’s cover design for the 1861 edition of Christina’s Rossetti’s ‘Poems’ and Whistler’s frames for some of his paintings. Beardsley’s reeding echoes the straight lines of his candles. Moreover, he combined the elements of this design with deliberate disjunction of size and two-dimensional flatness, techniques prominent in Japanese woodblock prints. The cover design exemplifies Beardsley’s mature style, compounded of Western and Eastern style. Eighteenth-century fashion plates by Moreau le Jeune inspired Beardsley’s ‘keyhole’ effect, for example, and these black overlapping shapes at the border lend depth to the inner design. Although most of his lines are regularly spaced and straight, like Japanese print designers, he did not spatially congest the design; he radically;y simplified the dense ornament, and he left uncluttered space around the scissors and candles. To create a cover serene in overall design that emphasises the poem’s subject, the lock of hair and scissors, he offset hard-edged with curved strokes, realistic with abstract pattern, black masses with blank areas, repeating these shapes with a Western geometrical regularity (Zatlin 1997, pp. 51-2). The shapes ‘with their symbolism and ambiguities’ prepare the way for the poem’s drama (Halsband 1980, p.91). Unusually, this cover design was reproduced inside the Bijou edition of 1897 for which Beardsley designed a fresh cover (no. 986 below).\r\nIn turn, Beardsley influenced the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a member of the group known as the Glasgow Four. They appropriated Beardsley’s sweeping line from ‘Le Morte Darthur’, beginning with the publication of part one in June 1893, soon after which it became explicit in their work, and they publicly acknowledged their connection with Beardsley in November 1894 (Eadie 1990, pp. 71, 196-7, 199, 201). Mackintosh's 1896 architecture and interior for Miss Cranston’s Buchanan Street Tearooms, Glasgow, designed in collaboration with George Walton, reverberates with Beardsley’s line. In this restaurant, Mackintosh softened angular doors and mirrored walls by applying lead in mathematically placed but flowing lines regularly pierced by coloured ovals and enlarged Beardsleyan roses. The entire room similarly plays with hard-edged geometric shapes against rounded lines, creating an effect comparable to Beardsley’s cover for this book. "}],"production":"","productionType":{"text":"","id":""},"contentDescription":"","contentPlaces":[],"associatedPlaces":[],"contentPerson":[],"associatedPerson":[{"text":"Leonard Smithers","id":"C5246"}],"contentOrganisations":[],"associatedOrganisations":[],"contentPeople":[],"associatedPeople":[],"contentEvents":[],"associatedEvents":[],"contentOthers":[{"text":"scissors","id":"AAT23459"},{"text":"candelabra","id":"AAT37584"},{"text":"candles","id":"AAT37654"},{"text":"hair","id":"AAT11814"}],"contentConcepts":[],"contentLiteraryRefs":["'The Rape of the Lock' by Alexander Pope"],"galleryLabels":[],"partNumbers":["E.304-1972"],"accessionNumberNum":"304","accessionNumberPrefix":"E","accessionYear":1972,"otherNumbers":[],"copyNumber":"","aspects":["WHOLE"],"assets":[],"recordModificationDate":"2026-03-24","recordCreationDate":"2009-06-30","availableToBook":false}}