SHAKESPEARE, William.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Dramatic Works. A finely bound volume with a likely contemporary fore-edge painting of Anne Hathaway's cottage. It has the gilt bookplate of Willis Vickery (1859-1932) and is listed in the sale catalogue of his library. Vickery was a judge and editor of Shakespeare whose impressive collection featured all four Folios and an array of luxury bindings, of which a number had fore-edge paintings.Hathaway's childhood home was a favourite subject of 19th-century fore-edge paintings ever since Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1820), with its chapter on Stratford-on-Avon, "occasioned what has become an unending series of pilgrimages to that and other literary shrines" (Weber, p. 83). This watercolour may be the work of Winifred Arthur (1864-1934), a Liverpool-based fore-edge painter whose grandfather founded (and whose father was a director of) Howell's, the booksellers for whom this volume was bound. This painting, however, does not feature her monogram.Provenance: Stephen C. Massey.

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