Jade

In Collaboration with

00.

LeLivre de Jade

01.

TheBackground

Subchapters

02.

DramatisPersonae

Subchapters

03.

TheProduction

Subchapters

04.

TheText

Subchapters

05.

TheAppendix

Subchapters

References

  • 01Throughout this book L'Album de poèmes tirés du Livre de Jade is referred to as ‘Jade’ for convenience and simplicity.
  • 02TJ Cobden-Sanderson. The Journals of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson 1879-1922. London and New York, Vol. I. 1926: p. 383.
  • 03Sir Emery Walker (1851–1933): an important figure in the printing world and Private Press movement. It is said he became interested in printing when at the age of 12 he bought a seventeenth-century book from a rag and bone man. He was largely self-taught and in 1883 set up the firm of Walker and Boutall; he developed a technique of engraving for illustrating books with artwork. Walker lived close to William Morris in Hammersmith, and they met at socialist events and became close friends. Walker introduced Morris to printing and typefaces and was instrumental in the foundation of Morris’s Kelmscott Press. He also acted as an advisor to Hornby’s Ashendene Press, and in 1900 set up his own press, Doves Press, with bookbinder TJ Cobden-Sanderson (1840–1922). Both men were close to Morris and involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, were acquaintances of Lucien Pissarro and admirers of Eragny Press.
  • 04Anon. Lucien Pissarro in England: The Eragny Press 1895–1914. Oxford: Ashmolean Press, 2011. The work of the press is well recorded in the numerous letters and contemporary documents, many of which are in the Pissarro Archive at the Ashmolean Museum, along with trial proofs, drawings, engravings and other artistic materials. From these it is possible to build up a fairly complete picture of the technical, financial and aesthetic aspects of the press.
  • 05Marcella D Genz. A History of the Eragny Press. New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2004.
  • 06The Dial stretched to five issues printed between 1889 and 1897 only. Wilde had told Ricketts, on being sent the first issue, ‘it is quite delightful, but don’t bring out a second number, all perfect things should be unique’.
  • 07Rickett’s first book was Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and his second Wilde’s The House of Pomegranates (1891).
  • 08Anon. Lucien Pissarro in England: The Eragny Press 1895–1914. Oxford: Ashmolean Press, 2011. The work of the press is well recorded in the numerous letters and contemporary documents, many of which are in the Pissarro Archive at the Ashmolean Museum, along with trial proofs, drawings, engravings and other artistic materials. From these it is possible to build up a fairly complete picture of the technical, financial and aesthetic aspects of the press.
  • 09Marcella D Genz. A History of the Eragny Press. New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2004.
  • 10Anne Thorold. The letters of Lucien to Camille Pissarro 1883-1903. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012.
  • 11Ashmolean Museum, Pissarro Family Archive.
  • 12Ashmolean Museum, Pissarro Family Archive.
  • 13Le Livre de Jade. Paris: Lemerre 1867.
  • 14Fusako Hamao. The sources of the texts in Mahler’s ‘Lied von der Erde’. 19th Century Music 1995; 19(1): 83–95.
  • 15The Second Viennese School consisted of a group of composers in the early twentieth century, led by Arnold Schoenberg. Berg and Webern were among his first pupils.
  • 16Joanne Richardson. Judith Gautier: A biography. New York: Franklin Watts, 1987 is an excellent and definitive account of her life and work.
  • 17Her father, Théophile Gautier, was a man of letters, poet and novelist. Her mother, Ernestine Grisi, was herself a famous Parisian figure whose sister, Carlotta, was a renowned ballerina. Carlotta was the first Giselle in Gautier’s ballet of the same name and also Théophile’s mistress.
  • 18Bettina L Knapp. Judith Gautier: Writer, orientalist, musicologist, feminist. A literary biography. Lanham, MA: Hamilton Books, 2004.
  • 19Cited in Elaine Brody. Letters from Judith Gautier to Chalmers Clifton. The French Review 1985; 58(5): 670.
  • 20‘Dans une fourrure de plumes, la fille de Théophile Gautier est belle, d’une beauté étrange. Son teint d’une blancheur à peine rosée, sa bouche découpée, comme un bouche de primitif, sur l’ivoire de larges dents, ses traits purs et comme sommeillants, ses grands yeux, où des cils d'animal, des cils durs et semblables à des petites épingles noires n’adoucissent pas d’une pénombre le regard, donnent à la léthargique créature l’indéfinissable et le mystérieux d’une femme-sphinx d’une chair, d’une matière, dans laquelle il n’y aurait pas de nerfs modernes.’
  • 21Robert Jacobs. Wagner and Judith Gautier. Music and Letters 1937 18:134.
  • 22Victor Hugo wrote Ave, Dea; Moriturus te Salutat, a poem about Judith in 1872, which includes the following lines: Judith, nos deux destins sont plus près l’un de l’autre/Qu’on ne croirait, à voir mon visage et le vôtre; Tout le divin abîme apparaît dans vos yeux,/Et moi, je sens le gouffre étoilé dans mon âme; Nous sommes tous les deux voisins du ciel, madame/Puisque vous êtes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
  • 23J Bensusan Butt. Recollections of Lucien Pissarro in His Seventies. Salisbury: Compton Press, 1974.
  • 24Gould B. ‘The Brook’, Chiswick: The home of the Eragny Press. Private library, 1971: 140–147.
  • 25Ashmolean Museum, Pissarro Family Archive.
  • 26Ashmolean Museum, Pissarro Family Archive.
  • 27Originally it was to be printed by Eragny Press, but Lucien had his stroke just as the typesetting was beginning and it was then transferred to Ballantyne Press and published under the Vale imprint.
  • 28Lucien Pissarro wrote to Camille Pissarro that their definition of ‘gothic as spiritual materialism’ would ‘make people shout a bit’ (LP to CP 19 February 1897), although the reference to spiritual materialism in the essay is too obscure surely to have this effect!
  • 29Morris died in October 1896, just after they had finished the essay text (which was dated June 1896); they added to their book a section on the influence of William Morris, in which they acknowledged that ‘the harmony of the book is due to Morris and Burne Jones’.
  • 30Clausen was a fellow artist who exhibited at the New English Art Club. Letter 21 March 1941, in Pissarro Archive, Ashmolean Museum, cited in Marcella D Genz. A History of the Eragny Press. New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2004.
  • 31Laura Urbanelli. The Wood Engravings of Lucien Pissarro and a Bibliographical List of Eragny Books. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1994.
  • 32Lucien Pissarro. Notes on the Eragny Press, and a Letter to J.B. Manson. Edited with a supplement by Alan Fern. Cambridge: privately printed, 1957.
  • 33Lucien Pissarro. Notes on the Eragny Press, and a Letter to J.B. Manson. Edited with a supplement by Alan Fern. Cambridge: privately printed, 1957.
  • 34Lucien Pissarro. Notes on the Eragny Press, and a Letter to J.B. Manson. Edited with a supplement by Alan Fern. Cambridge: privately printed, 1957.
  • 35Manson JB. Notes on some wood-engravings of Lucien Pissarro. Imprint 1913; 240–247. Imprint was a beautifully printed magazine devoted to artistic aspects of printing. It was published in only nine issues in 1913 and used a new and wonderfully clear typeface, Imprint Old Face, produced by the Monotype Company. The same typeface was used for the 22,000 pages of the 20 volumes of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
  • 36Esther was certainly interested in flowers and was a keen gardener throughout her life, exchanging letters with Monet on gardening matters, and she created her own ‘impressionist’ garden at her home in Chiswick.
  • 37SR Yu-Keng, cited in: Bettina L Knapp. Judith Gautier: Writer, orientalist, musicologist, feminist. A literary biography. Lanham, MA: Hamilton Books, 2004.
  • 38Aujourd’hui, comme jadis, en Chine, les vers sont toujours unis à la musique: on ne les récite pas, on les chante. … Le plus souvent, le chant est accompagné par la lyre chinoise … qui doit vibrer, seulement, devant ceux qui sont dignes de l’entendre, car ses cordes delicates se brisent, leurs ondes mélodieuses ondes se heurtent à une oreille impie.

Chapter 01.

The Private Press Movement

This artistic movement, arising in West London in the late nineteenth century, refers to a group of small printing presses run by artists. The presses shared a common philosophy of book production, in which traditional printing methods and materials were used and in which the emphasis was on the book itself as a work of art.

leaf illustration

Timeline of five of the private presses

1891

Kelmscott Press

William Morris

The Kelmscott Press was founded in 1890, and was active until Morris’s death in 1896. It produced 52 works.

Morris believed in ‘the ideal book’ (as he entitled a lecture in 1883), which was essentially both a book and a work of art. His was a vision created as a reaction against the ugliness of most Victorian book production, which he considered debased by industrialisation and commercialisation. Art and craftsmanship were to be reunited. The Ideal Book was a book created by a master-craftsman, working in a medieval tradition and his inspiration was largely from the fifteenth century (Camille Pissarro hated this archaism, and told Lucien so on many occasions). It should have a number of characteristics: a fine font (he preferred the fifteenth-century gothic and also the roman fonts of Nicholas Jenson) and weighed in especially against the narrow lettering of Victorian printing; he considered the importance of legibility and avoiding the ‘irrational swellings and spiky projections’ of modern typography; he emphasised the importance of correct spacing, and of avoiding ‘the ugly meandering white lines or “rivers” in a page’; the size of the margins should be in due proportion to the print so that, when viewed as an open book, the pages should appear solid with larger lower and outer margins; the paper should be well chosen, and is a ‘necessary part’ of the Ideal Book; the ornament should be part of the page and harmonised with the typeface. He inveighed against the ‘sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut’. These principles became widely appreciated and were certainly influential in defining Lucien’s approach to printing.

1894

Eragny Press

Lucien and Esther Pissarro

The Eragny Press4 was established in 1894, and closed down in 1914. During these 20 years, only 32 titles were published.5 The books were produced in a small format (with only one exception – Areopagitica) and no book had more than 240 copies made, usually with 5 or so on vellum for special collectors or museums. They were beautifully illustrated with a total of over 300 woodcuts in all, the great majority drawn and cut by Lucien.

1895

Ashendene Press

CH St John Hornby

Charles Henry St John Hornby founded a small printing workshop in Ashendene in Hertfordshire in 1894. It later became one of a group of creative presses that defined the Private Press movement. It’s progression from small workshop to creative press owes a lot to a meeting with William Morris in 1895, which led to Hornby moving the press to Chelsea.

Only a few of its books were illustrated, with Hornby focusing on beautiful type and mise-en-page, which is about artistry of layout.

The Ashendene originally ran until 1915, when it closed until 1920. It finally closed for good 15 years later in 1935.

1896

Vale Press

Charles de Sousy Ricketts

A total of 46 different titles were printed by the Vale Press (including 39 volumes of the works of Shakespeare). The books were designed completely by Ricketts, including the watermarks on the paper, the type, wood-engravings and bindings. The books are lighter in appearance than the Kelmscott books, less gothic, less profusely illustrated and more true to their renaissance origins. However, unlike the Kelmscott books, the type and ornamentation are hardly harmonised. Nevertheless, the Vale Press books are influential and sometimes beautiful works of art.

Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866–1931) was perhaps the most important single influence on Lucien Pissarro’s publishing endeavour. Ricketts is now best known for his work in typography and, at the time Lucien was introduced to him, he was himself embarking on his career as a publisher, wood-engraver and maker of fine books. He studied at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Lambeth, and it was there that he met Charles Shannon (1863–1937) who was to be his lifelong partner, and they lived together in a house in Chelsea, ‘The Vale’, previously inhabited by John Singer Sargeant. In 1898, Shannon and Ricketts had started their own magazine, The Dial.6 This ‘periodical devoted to the arts’ was an illustrated literary magazine influenced by the works of the French and Belgian symbolists. Oscar Wilde was sent a complimentary copy and through this became a close friend and, under his influence, Ricketts began to design books,7 printed initially by Ballantyne Press. Ricketts held salons at the Vale, to which Lucien was invited, and his circle included influential figures in London’s artistic life including William Morris, Thomas Sturge Moore, Reginald Savage, Oscar Wilde, William Rossetti, Madox Brown, Walter Crane, Emery Walker, and writers such as Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley (who wrote together as Michael Field), WB Yeats, John Gray, George Bernard Shaw and Cecil Lewis.

1900

Doves Press

TJ Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker

The Doves Press was founded around 1900, based in Hammersmith Terrace, a short walk from Williams Morris’s house and named after the Doves public house opposite. Cobden-Sanderson and Walker entered into a partnership, and designed and printed a series of fine handmade books between 1900 and 1916, of which the English Bible (1902–1904) is perhaps the most celebrated. The books were printed in the Doves’ typeface, a roman face designed by Cobden-Sanderson, and unlike other private presses of the time were of a uniform size and shape, and bound in skin. They are masterpieces of clear and simple but beautiful design. In 1909 the two men became entangled in a legal dispute over the rights to the Doves’ typeface, and the partnership was dissolved. As part of the settlement, Cobden-Sanderson agreed to leave the type to Walker, but, in 1913 – rather than honouring this agreement and to stop others using the type – he surreptitiously dumped the matrices and punches into the River Thames from Hammersmith Bridge, and then over the next few years similarly disposed of the metal type. This must have been the inspiration for Lucien Pissarro, after Eragny Press was closed down, similarly to throw his Brook typeface into the English channel on a voyage to France.

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