Other Early Illustrators...

 

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with Twelve Photogravures after Drawings by Gilbert James, George Routledge and Sons Ltd., London, 1904.

 

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt decorated and titled upper board and spine; 160pp., top edge gilt, with 12 monochrome photogravure images each with a tissue guard. Somewhat rolled; all corners bumped; boards well-rubbed with some stains; spine is sunned, softened at the head and tail and with a woodworm hole at the foot; free endpapers have been removed; frontispiece is detached and its tissue guard is missing; all pages are lightly embrowned, especially at the page and text block edges; scattered foxing throughout, especially around the plates; offset to endpapers. Fair to good.

Far be it for me to suggest that, after Elihu Vedder and before Edmund Dulac, no other artist turned their hand to the Rubaiyat and produced an illustrated version of the poem. On the contrary: once Vedder had proposed the possibility, illustrated versions flourished, reaching a peak in 1909 with Dulac and Willy Pogany (of whom, more later). Technology was the time-keeper in this race however, and the production of Rubaiyat copies marched to its beat.

It’s good to remember that Vedder’s images for his version of the poem contained the text as an intrinsic part of the illustration: that is, the text was hand-written onto the image so that text and image could be printed at the same time. This was a cheap work-around past the problem that text and images could not, at that stage, be printed concurrently. Another way around the issue was to print the images separately and then to glue, or “tip in”, these plates onto blank pages within the printed text block. This was done by hand and was very time-consuming.

Many illustrators turned their hands to productions of the poem, often simply designing the book or providing a single frontispiece image (which brought down production costs). Designing meant providing repeat images or patterns to be used as endpaper decorations, margins, chapter headings or colophons (those intricate images which signal the end of a section within a book). Designing a book extended to the typeface and font of the text and occasionally required large initials to be created also. Many exercises in two-colour process printing came of these simpler, less pictorial editions. A well-designed book gave a sense of a unified production and made the work seem more satisfying.

Which brings us to Gilbert James. James is probably the most enigmatic of the Rubaiyat illustrators, since very little is known about him. He was (as far as can be determined) born in Liverpool and illustrated several collections of fairy tales. Between 1896 and 1898, he published many images inspired by the Rubaiyat in the magazine The Sketch, for which he worked along with several other journals. These were collected together in one volume in 1898 by the publisher Leonard Smithers of London and sold well. The original set of images were monochrome drawings; those images were re-used via the photogravure process for the 1906 re-release shown above. By this time, these new photographic processes had also been thrown into the mix of technological innovations with which the printing world was experimenting.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Gilbert James prepared no less than three complete sets of images for different editions of the Rubaiyat. His style sits squarely in the Orientalist school of Rubaiyat illustrators. Vedder’s images, no doubt informed by the Italian surroundings amidst which he prepared them, are a Classical imagining, tinged with overtones of the Art Nouveau: they have been called the first Art Nouveau works produced in America. Dulac’s work too, is Orientalist in nature but is far more lavish than the images produced by James: his drawings are far more static and sombre, obviously informed by the more introspective and gloomy imagery of the poetry. By that fateful year 1909, James had also moved into the world of colour and his best known set of pictures took full advantage of the new printing processes:

 

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, A. & C. Black Ltd., London, 1946.

 

Octavo; hardcover, with decorated spine and upper board and blue titling on black decorative labels; 136pp., with a full-colour frontispiece and 7 plates likewise. Boards slightly fanned; retailer’s bookplate to front pastedown; offset to endpapers; text block edges faintly spotted. Price-clipped and over-printed dustwrapper is well-rubbed and chipped along the edges and the extremities of the spine panel; a tipped-in note from the publisher appears on the front flap. Good to very good.

If anything negative can be said about James’ catalogues of Rubaiyat images, it is that he tends to recycle his imagery again and again. Most of his pictures contain the same two figures – a poet in kaftan and tarboosh accompanied by a saki, or cupbearer – in various bucolic landscapes, with little or no relevance to the verse they appear alongside. Different editions show slight re-workings of older compositions, which suggests either time-pressure or laziness on his part. Some images are tentative or banal; others dynamic and masterful: either way, they are a handsome addition to the text wherever they appear.

 

Another artist who contributed early to the Rubaiyat phenomenon was Sir Frank Brangwyn. His first edition was produced by the London company of Gibbings in 1906. Unlike Gilbert James, who remains mostly anonymous, Brangwyn is very well known indeed, a member of the peerage and of the Royal Academy. While my collection lacks a copy of the first Brangwyn edition, I do have copies of two later editions.

 

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Illustrated by Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A., T.N. Foulis, London, 1911.

 

Square octavo; hardcover, with gilt upper board and spine titling; 128pp., untrimmed and top edge gilt, with half-tone decorations on each page with coloured initials, and a full-colour, tipped-in frontispiece, with seven additional plates, likewise. Very slightly rolled; boards well-rubbed with some stains and corners bumped; spine sunned; minor scattered foxing throughout; several pages towards the end have been roughly opened; plate number six has been folded and one-third has come away (now missing). Else, good.

Brangwyn’s illustrations are expressionistic and are a distinct departure from the Art Nouveau and Symbolist leanings of Vedder and James. Nevertheless he manages to capture an idyllic and vivacious Oriental sensibility which places him firmly in that camp of illustrators. His almost Impressionist portrayals of light and water lend a strong sense of place throughout his images, a place which, arguably, owes more to countryside England than the Middle East. That being said, his pictures ground the philosophy of the poetry in a “real” context and steers the imagery away from the heavily choreographed formality of the Art Nouveau.

 

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám, Introduction by Joseph Jacobs, designs by Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A., Sampson Low, Marston & Company, London, n.d. (c.1932).

 

Octavo; hardcover, bound in full brown morocco with gilt spine and upper-board titling with gilt decorations, decorated endpapers; 135pp., top edge gilt printed in green with decorations, with a full-colour tipped-in frontispiece and three plates likewise, one bound in. Top hinge starting; previous owner’s ink inscription to front free endpaper; spine head heavily chipped; corners bumped; offset to endpapers; text block and page edges lightly toned; mild scattered foxing throughout. Good.

Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956), along with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is one of only a handful of well-known artists who took to illustrating the Rubaiyat. Brangwyn was a regular contributor to the Royal Academy’s exhibitions and turned his artistic attentions to furniture, pottery and work in murals. He created two portfolios of images based upon the Rubaiyat in the early years of the Twentieth Century most of which are taken from small works in oil. As with James’ images, these were used again, whole and in part, across the next hundred years by a wide variety of publishing houses.