A Box of Paints.

£50 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Neat diamond-shaped bookplate of Albert Ehrman on front pastedown, the collector of printing history and incunabula who created the Broxbourne Library. Lacking dust jacket, boards a little rubbed and light sporadic spotting throughout. Attractive line-drawings by Albert Rutherston illustrating poems on various themes by Geoffrey Scott, which were written during his brief and rather unlikely affair with Vita Sackville-West. Rutherston was close friends with Claud Lovat-Fraser, indeed it was he who had first introduced Oliver Simon to Lovat, and he emulated the latter’s use of the colour line block to create works of a “charmingly decorative nature” (Arists at Curwen). Beginning with The Four Seasons in 1922, about which Rutherston declared that “I have never had any designs of mine more beautifully reproduced than these,“ “the technique reaches its apogee in A Box of Paints where, with four printed colours over the black key, the artist rings a remarkable variety of changes”

• Year: 1923

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