Watson on Tour: Le Morte d'Arthur on Display
The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design in Gallery 955, with books at its center
«As the main research library for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Thomas J. Watson Library focuses its collecting and services on providing materials for scholars. Among our hundreds of thousands of reference works, though, many are beautiful and significant, and sometimes they are requested by curators inside and outside the Museum for inclusion in exhibitions. Most recently, Watson's copy of the 1892 edition of Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century classic Morte d'Arthur, published by J.M. Dent with decorations by the young Aubrey Beardsley, went on display in the Met's current exhibition The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design, on view through October 26. The exhibition explores the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on a range of fine and practical arts—from painting, drawing, and printmaking, to textiles, ceramics, furniture, stained glass, and book design.»
The Museum owns the original drawings for three of Beardsley's illustrations for the Dent Malory. Curators Constance McPhee (Drawings and Prints) and Alison Hokanson (European Paintings) selected for exhibition a dark border of angels and sinuous flowers for the opening of Book Vii, Chapter i, "How Beaumains Came to King Arthur's Court and Demanded Three Petitions of King Arthur." (The other two drawings, not on display, are smaller ornaments.) McPhee commented that Beardsley is known to have made hundreds of drawings for the book, so it's not surprising that a few of them are in the Met's vast collection. She identified one of the small ones only during the research for this exhibition.
Two Arthurian books and a border drawn by Aubrey Beardsley
I went along to the installation to see how our book was set up in its case between the original drawing and William Morris's neo-Malorian Well at the World's End with Edward Burne-Jones's illustrations (the border, initial, and typeface are by Morris). As it happens, Well at the World's End is owned by the Department of Drawings and Prints—part of its remit to collect illustrated books as works of art—not by the library.
Object labels adjusted by Sue Koch, the exhibition graphic designer
If you know the Morte d'Arthur, then you know that it's a hefty tale. The slim paperbound volume on view is number three of twelve volumes issued separately over the course of more than a year.
Volume three removed from its protective Mylar wrap, showing the title page
Conservator Angela Campbell gently tying down the book's pages, using polyurethane and silk thread
McPhee explained that Burne-Jones and Morris were powerful influences on Beardsley's style; Beardsley indeed spent some time in Burne-Jones's studio, and was encouraged by him to take art classes and pursue art as his profession. But by the time the younger artist had worked his way through the Morte d'Arthur he had also worked his way to a distinctive aesthetic, one that was less medieval and more influenced by Japanese prints. She compared Beardsley's border with Morris's, pointing out that Morris's densely woven grapevines reflect medieval models more closely than Beardsley's irregularly looping stems.
Books with borders: Burne-Jones and Morris (left); Beardsley (right)
Book illustration, McPhee noted, was among the key vectors for transmitting the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly through illustrated editions of the popular medievalizing poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The 1857 Moxon Tennyson, a selection of Tennyson's poems that includes "The Lady of Shalott," "Sir Galahad," and "Morte d'Arthur," was illustrated with fifty-four wood engravings from designs by eight artists including John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and would have been another precedent for Beardsley's illustrations. The Museum's copy of this book, opened to Rossetti's Galahad image, is displayed with other book illustrations in the case, back-to-back with Beardsley's drawing.
Case with Rossetti's Galahad from the Moxon Tennyson
Now a question for the reader: Are the snaky blossoms in Beardsley's border lilies, or something else?
Aubrey Beardsley's twining florals
Nancy Mandel
Nancy Mandel was formerly the manager for library administration in the Thomas J. Watson Library.