Self-Portrait by Guy Davenport, age 19

Guy Davenport (1927-2005), Self-Portrait, 1946. Oil on board. Graphic Arts Collection. Gift of Jacqueline Brown, given in honor of Clarence Brown. Reproduced with permission from the Davenport estate.

Thanks to the generous donation of Jacqueline Brown, we have acquired of a wonderful 1946 self-portrait by the American essayist, fiction writer, poet, translator, and painter Guy Davenport (1927-2005). The painting had been a gift by the artist to Clarence Brown (1929-2015), professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, who was a classmate of Davenport’s at the Anderson Boys’ High School in South Carolina and his life-long friend.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” also named a Distinguished Professor at the University of Kentucky, Davenport is remembered more for than his fifty published books than his visual art. Happily, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt titled his obituary for the New York Times, “Prolific Author and Illustrator.”

In his remembrance, Roy Behrens, University of Iowa, wrote, “Guy had drawn and painted since childhood (at age eleven, he had started an amateur newspaper in his hometown of Anderson, South Carolina, for which he wrote and also drew the pictures for all of the stories). As an adult, he used a crow quill pen to create the accompanying images for his own and the writings of others (I think the first of these I saw were in Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters), in which he nearly always used a tedious method called “stippling” (still used today in scientific illustration), which is the “line art” equivalent of Georges Seurat’s pointillism.”

Davenport drew illustrations for Hugh Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1968), as well as his own publications, Tatlin!: Six Stories (1974); Da Vinci’s Bicycle: Ten Stories (1979); Apples and Pears and Other Stories (1984); The Lark (1993); and Flowers and Leaves (1961). A prolific author, if we have missed some, please let us know.

For more, see Erik Anderson Reece, A Balance of Quinces (1996), Rare Books: Leonard Milberg Coll. of American Poetry (ExRML) PS3554.A86 B34 1996; the only book so far about Guy as a visual artist.

Also The Guy Davenport reader; edited and with an afterword by Erik Reece (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, [2013]). Firestone Library (F) PS3554.A86 A6 2013

 

For more author’s portraits in the Graphic Arts Collection, see https://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2009/12/the_authors_portrait.html

 

Let Us All Be Unhappy Together


 

“Let Us All Be Unhappy Together,” part 9, p.96 in The Universal Songster, or, Museum of Mirth: forming the most complete, extensive, and valuable collection of ancient and modern songs in the English language… embellished with a humorous characteristic frontispiece and twenty-nine wood-cuts [per vol.] designed by George and Robert Cruikshank, and engraved by J.R. Marshall (London: Printed for John Fairburn …, 1825-1826). Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Cruik 1825.5

In 1790, Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) composed and performed a musical entertainment called The Wags, or, The Camp of Pleasure at the Lyceum Theatre in London. One of its hit tunes titled “Sound Argument” became better known for the chorus, “Let us all be unhappy together.”

This may well have been the primary inspiration to James Beresford, who later wrote The Miseries of Human Life, which in turn inspired the one act farce by Dibdin’s son Thomas, “The Miseries of Human Life; or, Let Us All Be Unhappy Together,” performed at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1807.

The Miseries of Human Life and Other Entertainments: Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/object-package/miseries-human-life-and-other-amusements-drawings-thomas-rowlandson/112600

There were a number of caricatures, broadsides, and illustrated scores inspired by “Unhappy Together.” Here are a few more:




Above:

Let us all be unhappy together, 1794. Mezzotint on wove paper. Published by Laurie & Whittle. (c) British Museum.

Isaac Cruikshank, Let us all be unhappy together. London, April 30, 1791. Etching on laid paper. Illustration to ballad Let Us All Be Unhappy Together, written and composed by Dibdin for his entertainment called The Wags. (c) Lewis Walpole Library

Unidentified artist, Let us all be unhappy together, 1812-17. Hand colored etching. Published by William Davison of Alnwick. (c) British Museum

On Princeton computers only, listen to a performance from The Jane Austen Songbooks: http://princeton.naxosmusiclibrary.com/catalogue/item.asp?cid=VOX-7537

LET US ALL BE UNHAPPY TOGETHER.

E bipeds, made up of frail clay,
Alas! are the children of sorrow;
And, though brisk and merry to-day,
We may all be unhappy to-morrow.
For sunshine’s succeeded by rain;
Then, fearful of life’s stormy weather,
Lest pleasure should only bring pain,
Let us all be unhappy together.

I grant the best blessing we know
Is a friend, for true friendship’s a treasure;
And yet, lest your friend prove a foe,
Oh! taste not the dangerous pleasure.
Thus friendship’s a flimsy affair, .
Thus riches and health are a bubble;
Thus there’s nothing delightful but care,
Nor anything pleasing but trouble.

If a mortal could point out that life
Which on earth could be nearest to heaven,
Let him, thanking his stars, choose a wife
To whom truth and honor are given.
But honor and truth are so rare,
And horns, when they’re cutting, so tingle,
That, with all my respect to the fair,
I’d advise him to sigh, and live single.

It appears from these premises plain,
That wisdom is nothing but folly;
That pleasure’s a term that means pain,
And that joy is your true melancholy;
That all those who laugh ought to cry,
That’t is fine frisk and fun to be grieving;
And that, since we must all of us die,
We should taste no enjoyment while living.

The Beach of Trouville

Princeton University Library’s collection of 1920s French silence movies for Pathé home movie projectors are primarily black and white. A select few have been hand colored using stencils, also called pochoir coloring. A good example is this documentary about the beach at Trouville. https://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2472


Here is a translation of the film titles:

Trouville, the queen of beaches. The beach of Trouville, with fine and uniform sand, is overlooked by a large terrace on which stands a casino. In the mirror-like puddles left by the tide, fisherwomen find an abundance of shrimp and sadeels. The bathers who go in at all hours offer a lively and joyful spectacle. “The Planks” are the summer boulevards of Paris. On the coast are pretty Norman chalets with braced windows surrounded by greenery. Romantic villas half buried in ivy. Flower beds are acclaimed by the residents to laugh. Mossy, dilapidated, century-old trees dominated by the heavy foliage at their summits. The little church of Criqueboeuf, buried under ivy, stands next to a flowery pond of water lilies. The calvary which stands against the beach uncovers an immense horizon. The Port of Trouville is situated at the mouth of the Touques and the Seine. Sometimes the delightful scenery is transformed and the furious ocean mounts and attacks the works of men that curb its flow. The end. Composition by Melle. G. Jousset.

The Princeton University Art Museum owns a beautiful oil painting of the beach at Trouville painted eighty years earlier by Eugène Boudin (1824–1898). Here is their description:

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), The Beach at Trouville, 1865. Oil on canvas. Gift of the Estate of Laurence Hutton. y1950-65. Boudin took Claude Monet under his wing in the 1850s, when the aspiring artist was still in his teens. Monet came to embrace the older painter’s primary artistic concerns, which included a fascination with the transience of visual sensation and the effects of light and weather on the landscape. He also taught the young man to value everyday scenes of French life and leisure. Boudin was among the first artists to capture in oils that novel, yet prosaic, nineteenth-century pastime, the beach vacation. Such excursions were made possible by the new railway lines, which first reached the northern coast of France, where this scene was painted, in the late 1840s.

A (new) Modest Proposal


Jonathan Swift, Gerald Scarfe, and Fintan O’Toole, A Modest Proposal, 2017. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process


To celebrate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Stoney Road Press has published a limited, boxed edition of the satirical essay A Modest Proposal, illustrated with three etchings by satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and an introduction by Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times literary editor and Princeton University Visiting Lecturer in Theater; Acting Chair, Fund for Irish Studies (Spring 2018).

A launch party was held June 17 at the Dalkey Book Festival, hosted by O’Toole, His remarks were followed by a reading of Swift’s essay by actor Nick Dunning.

It was noted that  Dunning got further than Peter O’Toole did in 1984. As Fintan O’Toole wrote, “When the Gaiety Theatre held a gala performance to mark its reopening after refurbishment, Peter O’Toole was invited to do the opening turn. Presumably, the expectation was that he would do a bit of Shakespeare, perhaps, or a Yeats poem. He decided to read, slowly and deliberately, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, with its suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food for their landlords, ‘who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.’ Some members of the dress-suited audience began to heckle; others walked out. RTÉ, which was broadcasting the show live, cut O’Toole off in the middle of the reading and went to an ad break.“ –Fintan O’Toole, “The Genius of Creative Destruction,” New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013

 

 

 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or the Country: and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick ([London]: Dublin, printed, and reprinted at London, for Weaver Bickerton, in Devereux-Court near the Middle-Temple, 1730). Rare Books (RB) RHT 18th-587

 

 

 

“In the large body of stories about him in the collections of the Irish Folklore Commission,” O’Toole continued, “Swift is almost always ‘the Dean’ or, in popular pronunciation, ‘the Dane’. The name shows immediate awareness that he was a high functionary of the established, Protestant, Church of Ireland—an institution unpopular with the oppressed Catholic majority. Yet he transcends these sectarian divisions. He was revered by middle-class Protestants, who named inns and ships after him and built bonfires to celebrate his birthday. Catholics, meanwhile, attached to ‘the Dean’ many of the common trickster stories that circulated around Europe. Swift and his servant, usually called Jack, form a comic double act.”

The Charleys in Grief

Macbeth to Lady Macbeth:
the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools:
William Heath, The Charleys in Grief or the Funeral of the City Watch Boxe’s, ca.1829. Etching with hand coloring. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2011.00923

Chapter 8 of Pierce Egan’s Life in London has a night scene on the east side of Temple Bar, in which Tom and Jerry catch a watchman sleeping and overturn his station or watchbox. George Cruikshank printed the original etching and one year later, William Heath was one of several artists who illustrated the sequel Real Life in London.

The night watchmen were first nicknamed Charleys during Charles II’s reign. See the history here: http://www.artinsociety.com/watchmen-goldfinders-and-the-plague-bearers-of-the-night.html. Charleys were ridiculed by caricaturists as elderly, often drunk, and incompetent.

Thanks to the Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, introduced by Sir Robert Peel, the old watchmen were replaced with a new metropolitan police force. Heath created another series of etchings for Thomas McLean to mark the last of the Charleys.

Attributed to William Heath, A Slap at the Charleys or a Tom & Jerry Lark, May 26, 1829. Etching with hand coloring. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2011.00870. This is probably a pirated etching after Heath, given the incorrect signature in the bottom left.

 

Anonymous artist, The Last of the Charley’s !!!!, September 1829. Etching with hand coloring. British Museum.

William Heath, Peeling a Charley, September 29, 1829. Etching with hand coloring. British Museum

William Heath, The Last Day or the Fall of the Charleys, October 3, 1929. Etching with hand coloring. British Museum

Pierce Egan (1772-1849), Life in London; or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and sprees through the metropolis. …designed and etched by I. R. & G. Cruikshank (London: Printed for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Cruik 1821

Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq.: and his cousin the Hon. Tom. Dashall, &c…. by an amateur, illustrated by William Heath , Richard Dighton , Henry Thomas Alken and Thomas Rowlandson (London: Printed for Jones & Co. … , 1821-1823). Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Rowlandson 1821.2

W. T. (William Thomas) Moncrieff (1794-1857), Tom and Jerry: or, Life in London: an operatic extravaganza, in three acts (London: Thomas Richardson, [1828]). “Performed upwards of three hundred nights at the Adelphi Theatre, and recently revived at Covent Garden Theatre, Surrey, &co.” — T.p. Rare Books: Theatre Collection (ThX) 3593.686 v. 116

 

Five Dials

http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01zp38wg21x

Hamish Hamilton is one of London’s oldest publishing houses, founded by Jamie Hamilton in 1931. Home to authors such as J.D. Salinger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, W.G. Sebald and Truman Capote, their aim remains to publish the very best literary writers from around the world, from Alain de Botton to Zadie Smith.

They also publish the online literary magazine Five Dials, available directly to your email free of charge. To make the publication searchable and easily available to our students, the dspace (read digital) team and especially Kim Leaman, Special Collections Assistant V, is uploading the run into our catalogue. You can also use the permanent URL:
http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp010z709004v

Literary magazine is named after the old red-light area Five Dials in London—-notably the area Hamish Hamilton’s offices on 80 Strand overlook. In his Letter from the Editor, Craig Taylor writes “we’re hoping Five Dials will be a repository for the new, a chance to focus on ideas that might not work elsewhere, a place to witness writers testing new muscles, producing essays, extracts and unexplainables.” –Five Dials, no. 1, http://fivedials.com/

Each issue has a separate title and theme, such as no. 30: A Stranger Again (The Camus Issue) or no. 10, Celebrating the life and work of David Foster Wallace 1962-2008. The upload should be complete next week.

Special housing for Mr. Ervin

We recently announced a gift from Newcombe C. Baker III, Class of 1974, and his family, who donated his great-grandfather Spencer Ervin’s death mask. The material just returned from our conservation lab and we thought it might be interesting to show how this generous gift has been processed, making it ready for future researchers.

Lindsey Hobbs, Collections Conservator for Rare Books & Special Collections, had an acid-free custom box built to house all the parts to this gift together in one place. The box was designed with a drop-down side for easy access to the material inside. Special packing was created to cushion and separate the plaster mask from the original wood carrying case. Finally, individual boxes were built to house each of the extra plaster parts that came with Mr. Ervin’s death mask.


The mask will join the collection of life and death masks formed by Laurence Hutton (1843-1904). To see the other faces in this collection, take a look at the website built by John Delaney: http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/

 

The Kalevala

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a small volume that probably should have been on our shelves many years earlier. First published in 1835, the Kalevala is complete in 22,795 verses, divided into fifty songs of Finnish folklore, compiled thanks to Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884).

This contemporary presentation of one section was printed in 1992 by the Maine artist David C. Wolfe, “arranged for oral presentation” by Anne Witten. The book has only 15 pages but they are beautifully printed letterpress with original woodcuts by Wolfe, bound in handmade cream and brown Lokta paper over boards.

This project was published at Wolfe Editions in the Bakery Studios on Pleasant Street in Portland, Maine. The building is also home to White Dog Arts, Peregrine Press, Art House Picture Frames, and 16 studio spaces making it a center for artistic activity in the city.

Many fine press books in our collection were printed by Wolfe, through his association with Anthoensen Press, Shagbark Press, Stinehour Press, and finally Wolfe Editions. Wolfe teaches letterpress printing from his own studio and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, an international craft school located in Deer Isle, Maine.

The Kalevala: a Creation Myth ([Portland, Maine]: David Wolfe, 1992). Copy 12 of 25. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process

http://wolfeeditions.com/

William Earl Dodge

“Sold for Old Copper,” New York Times, March 1, 1871

John James Audubon (1785-1851) had the copper printing plates for The Birds of America shipped to the United States in 1839. The plates survived a warehouse fire in 1845 and after his death, Lucy Audubon tried unsuccessfully to find a home for the collection. They were eventually sold in an 1870 “trade book” sale to Phelps, Dodge, & Co., where they were stored for an unknown time. In 1871 articles appeared in NY, Boston, and Chicago papers, voicing sadness that there was no one to save these important artifacts.

update**

It has been suggested that around 1873, William E. Dodge Jr. arranged various donations to museums around the country but in fact, earliest documented donation was a large group to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1876 and then another seven went to the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution in 1884-85. The Dodge family gave others to the Peabody Museum and four to Princeton University but we do not know when. The Smithsonian corresponded with William Dodge Jr. but credits his son, Cleveland Dodge. It is a difficult family to chronicle.

 

William Earle Dodge I (1805-1883) married Melissa Phelps (1809-1903), the daughter of Anson Green Phelps, a metal merchant. In 1833, Dodge and his father-in-law founded the mining firm Phelps, Dodge and Company. The company imported metals, mainly tin, from Great Britain and distributed them throughout the United States. Dodge also helped start the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and staunchly supported the Prohibition Movement, serving as President of the National Temperance Society from 1865 to 1883. A statue honoring his good work was commissioned by John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910), which stands today at the northeast corner of Bryant Park.

William Earl Dodge II (1832-1903) took over Phelps, Dodge, & Co. together with his cousin, Daniel Willis James, and transformed the company into one of the world’s largest and wealthiest mining corporations. Dodge II was a member of the Linnean Society, American Historical Association, New York Academy of Sciences, American Fine Arts Society, New York Geographical Society, New-York Historical Society, the New England Society of New York, the Century Association, and the National Academy of Design, among other clubs.

William Earl Dodge III (1858-1884) entered Princeton with the class of 1879, together with his younger brother Cleveland (1860-1926) and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924). “Earl Dodge” was a born athlete and played every possible sport Princeton had to offer. His abilities are credited with influencing the success of the 1876 conference at which Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton formed a football association and a new era in college sports began. When W.E. Dodge III graduated, he went to work at his father’s company Phelps, Dodge & Co., while Cleveland went into the lumber industry under his uncle, Arthur Murray Dodge. With the unexpected death of his brother in 1885, Cleveland became president of Phelps, Dodge & Company.

 

Cleveland commissioned a bronze sculpture of his brother by the artist Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), unveiled in 1913. The seven foot, six-inch figure of a young man in a football uniform was modeled from a photograph of Dodge III. The object of many student pranks, it was taken off-view in 1931 and later, loaned to the Daniel Chester French Foundation. Today, it can be seen in the lobby of Jadwin Gymnasium.

William Dodge Jr. preserved the plates and made some donations to various institutions but records vary. Brothers William Dodge III and Cleveland are also mentioned in donor records.

See in particular: Waldemar Fries, “Where are Audubon’s Copper Plates,” Audubon Magazine, July-August 1966.

 

Princeton’s Murray-Dodge Hall consists of two buildings, joined by a cloister, each a memorial to a Princetonian who died young. Murray Hall was built in 1879 with a bequest left by Hamilton Murray 1872, who went down with the S.S. Ville de Havre when it sank in mid-ocean on November 22, 1873; he had written his will the night before he sailed. Dodge Hall was built in 1900 in memory of Earl Dodge (William Earl Dodge III, class of 1879), who died five years after graduation. The funds were given by his father William Earl Dodge II and his brother Cleveland. Dodge Hall continues to be a center for religious activities, housing the offices of the dean and assistant dean of the chapel, the denominational chaplains, and various student religious and social service organizations. Murray Hall has since the 1920s been the home of Theatre Intime.

 

Read the full story of the Audubon printing plates in Print Quarterly: http://www.printquarterly.com/8-contents/69-contents-2020.html

Saint Savvas

Kyrillos (Cyril), Translation from the Greek: Saint Savvas, the Sanctified [Depictions from his life with, in foreground, monastery of Saint Savvas in Jerusalem]. Engraved at Mount Athos by Kyrillos, with expenses defrayed by Paisios, 1847, November 14. Engraving printed on cloth. 51.5 x 82.5 cm. (image: ~50 x 70 cm.). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process

We recently acquired another printed icon of the monastery of Saint Savvas near Jerusalem, this one depicting the building compound and its early church patron saint (439-532) with scenes from his life. The engraving was made at Mount Athos by the monk-engraver Kyrillos or Cyril, with expenses defrayed by another monk, Paisios. The plate is now preserved in the Saint Savvas monastery in the Holy Land, presumably indicating that this work was commissioned as a religious souvenir for that monastery.

The inscription below the frame reads: This icon of our Holy and Sanctified Father Savvas was engraved with the assistance of the most holy Athonite Kyrios Hatzihilarion and defrayed by Kyrios Paisios monk and bursar of the same monastery 1847 November 14 hand of Kyrillos Monk of Athos.


This is the description that comes along with the engraving:

The triangular fortress-like arrangement of buildings comprising the monastery of Saint Savvas in Palestine lying beside a torrent bed fills the entire width of the lower part of the engraving. A tall tower stands at the apex of the triangle; the katholikon and domed sepulchre of Saint Savvas occupy the inner courtyard. Fifteen male figures stand on the ramparts of the monastery walls, lower right. In front of the monastery are two kneeling Arabs, two pilgrims on horseback, and a couple of monks. A cameleer stands with three camels in the stream bed; above them are two monks strolling, another on horseback holding an umbrella, and a youth. In the distance is a tower.

The imposing full-length figure of Saint Savvas stands at the rear of the monastery; with his right hand he gives a blessing, and in his left holds an inscribed scroll: “Whosoever conquers the flesh has conquered nature. He who has conquered nature has set himself over nature.”

On either side of Savvas is the inscription “Saint Savvas” and in the upper right-hand corner a small bust of the Virgin carrying a scroll with an inscription (not translated). Either side of the saint are eight miniature scenes from his life; they are accompanied by the following captions:

Left: The Fiery Column, Which the Saint Saw One Night in Church Saint Savvas in the Lions’ Den Miracle Worked By Saint Savvas Concerning the Camel the Dormition of Saint Savvas

Right: He Administers the Eucharist to the Tired Fathers through His Prayers, The Saint Enables the Martyrs in the Fortress to Escape the Saint Addresses the Emperor the Murder of the Fathers

Below the miniatures, on the right: Monastery of Saint Savvas; and on the left: Saint Savvas’ Brook

This is one of 23 known engravings by Kyrillos, the most prolific of the engravers of Mount Athos, who was working on the Greek holy mountain between 1834 and 1862. An engraving tradition began on Mount Athos in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and continued until a ten-year hiatus over the Greek War of Independence. In the period following, to which our print belongs, a “distinctive Athonite style” – noted to be entirely separated from western engraving traditions – was achieved, which “was to persist unaltered, without any radical changes, until the end of the century” (Papastratou).

See: Dore Papastratou, Paper icons: Greek orthodox religious engravings 1665-1899 (2 vols., Athens 1990) 524-5 (#558), see also 27-31. Marquand Library Oversize NE655.2 .P3713 1990q