Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers (for "The Duchess of Malfi")

Henry Weston Keen British
 Related author John Webster British
 Related publisher John Lane, The Bodley Head British

Not on view

Keen worked as a printmaker and illustrator in the 1920s and 1930s, creating unsettling symbolist images reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley. Two significant commissions were designs for luxury editions published by The Bodley Head–a firm that had launched Beardsley in the 1890s–Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" (1925) and John Webster's "The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi" (1930). After Keen's early death from tuberculosis, The Twenty-One Gallery in London held a memorial exhibition.

Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers (for "The Duchess of Malfi"), Henry Weston Keen (British, 1899–1935 Walberswick, Suffolk), Pen and black ink, brush and wash

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