WAUGH (Evelyn).].

Large découpage from a 'Victorian Blood Book',

      - 39.5 x 53.5 cm., a multimedia work with manuscript additions and illustrations; composed of fragments of largely early nineteenth century prints (with one section possibly from an Albrecht Durer print of 1515), coloured nineteenth century scraps, cobalt blue and red paint, sepia ink. c. 1850s. In very good, crisp and clean condition, one large, old pinhole on each corner. Provenance; Burne Jones family by tradition. British. The Harry Ransom Centre has a volume in the Evelyn Waugh collection that has acquired the name 'Victorian Blood Book'. The découpage in hand was extracted, by the print trade, from a similar volume and is created by the same hand as the 'Blood Book'. Texan Librarian, Richard Oram has discovered that, rather incongruously, the book was commissioned as a wedding gift by John Bingley Garland, a Victorian businessman and founding father of Newfoundland, to his daughter, and was presented to her on September 1st 1854. Waugh was a collector of Victoriana, the grotesque and the bizarre at a time when it was probably out of style. Oram quotes Waugh's diaries on his collecting habits on the Library's e-news site: "By choosing preposterous objects as possessions I keep them at arm's length." This densely overlaid and complex composition with lots of blood dripping from the wings of clustered groups of angels and doves is very unsettling and perhaps should be kept at arm's length. The grotesquely decorated the Durer print has an elaborate border with Herakles fighting the Harpies which in turn surrounds a rectangular manuscript calligraphic section with a collage and a crucifix dripping with blood at dead centre. A small print of a dove is stuck on top of another small and surreal and elegant print of Jesus preaching in front of a crowd. Pasted onto this is a smaller figure of Christ with hand coloured red robes within a burst of wings, green rays and peals that are also dripping blood. In turn, the blood then drips onto a small print of a ship foundering in stormy seas and heading for the rocks, with an imposing lighthouse in silhouette. A background screed of chants in dark sepia ink is culled from the Book of Revelations. The iconography of this découpage is suffused with medieval and chivalric imagery. Waugh was himself drawn to the medieval Catholic imagery of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a yearning expressed most fully in 1926 with his privately printed essay 'PRB (i.e. the acronym of the group's name) and a biography of Rossetti. Of course Edward Burne Jones, also a leading light of the PRB', was fond of filling paintings such as 'The Briar Wood' and the 'Garden Court' with knights, flowers and maidens rather like the unknown découpagist here. Waugh was probably exposed to this iconography and imagery through a Spartan schooling régime at "Lancing College [which] was high-church. A Gothic structure incorporating much flint." (ODNB). It was at Lancing that he came under the influence of Francis Crease ".delicate and effeminate, [man who] taught Evelyn calligraphy and decorative design" (ibid). He was no stranger to découpage, that very unmodern form of collage, and took it up with alacrity when illustrating his book 'Love Among The Ruins' in late January 1953. Martin Stannard writes in his biography 'Evelyn Waugh. No Abiding City' that ".Waugh had set to work dismantling engravings to illustrate Love Among The Ruins" (p-320). Stannard quotes a letter from Waugh where he writes of working "'With dazzling eyes and a magnifying glass and a razor blade I attempted adaptation'" (op. cit.). Waugh was absorbed in the work for ".two months in a way that writing never could" and constructed a ".collage from engravings of Canova's work (op. cit.) reconstructing them by ".i