Fine First Edition - 1909 - Arthur Rackham’s Undine
Original Gilt-Decorated Cloth
With Rare Announcement
[Rackham, illus.] Fouque, De La Motte. UNDINE, Adapted from the German by W.L. Courteny (London: William Heinemann, 1909) First edition, first impression. THIS COPY WITH THE SCARCE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE EXHIBITION OF ARTHUR RACKHAM’S PAINTINGS. Illustrated endleaves, 15 tipped-in colour plates, line drawings and head and tail pieces by Arthur Rackham. 4to, publishers original full blue cloth, lettered and pictorially decorated in gilt on the spine and on the upper cover. 136 pp. A very handsome and very bright copy, especially so, with only a mild and minimal amount of the usual spotting to the edges or prelims.
SCARCE FIRST EDITION WITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT. This is the tale of a knight's marriage to a water-sprite, and what chanced therefrom. Rackham creates a stirring progression of emotional vignettes guided continuously by exquisite grace, lyricism, and romantic expression. His figures twist and sway with beauty and allure.
“Although the waves and eddies of Undine bear the mark of Art Nouveau, the work was still another step forward for Rackham, the unity of conception in the line drawings and the colour plates, the assertion of contrast in the moods of the heroine, rendering it a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding.”-Derek Hudson
Undine shows “Rackham’s different approaches to the treatment of water, which he depicts either as stylized metallic waves, like chased decoration on a pewter bowl, or as green blue reedy depths with the sun filtering through. Watery subjects, too, gave him the freedom to explore acrobatic movement in the figures, and to achieve this his studio trapeze came into its own as a tool for work rather than play, for his models to pose upon as they mimed a dive into the Thine. |
