uwmspeccoll:It’s Fine Press Friday!This week we present selected pages from In the Dawn of the World
uwmspeccoll:It’s Fine Press Friday!This week we present selected pages from In the Dawn of the World, with 25 original wood engravings illustrating a portion of the Book of Genesis byBritish artist and designer Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and printed in 1903 by D. B. Updike in an edition of 185 copies on handmade Alton Mill paper at the Merrymount Press in Boston for Charles E, Goodspeed, with a note on the designs by Burne-Jones’s son Philip. The type used here is the font designed for Updike by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, based on Nicolas Jenson’s type of 1470, for the first Merrymount Press productions beginning in 1894.The designs for the illustrations were originally produced as part of a large Bible project to be produced by the Kelmscott Press, but the death of William Morris in 1896 put an end to the undertaking. Burne-Jones had completed a number of drawings in pencil, but after Morris’s death they were laid aside, and Burne-Jones himself died two years later. In 1901, Burne-Jones’s widow Georgiana Macdonald decided to publish a selection of 25 of the drawings and commissioned Burne-Jones’s wood engraver Robert Catterson-Smith to complete the project. The results were printed here for the first time in America. Philip Burne-Jones describes the working process of his father and Catterson-Smith:The design was first made roughly in pencil, and afterwards elaborated and carefully completed in the same medium. A photograph of the finished drawing was then taken, laid down upon cardboard, and gone over with ink, under my father’s supervision. The strong black outline thus secured was again photographed on the wood block, which was then cut. During his long apprenticeship to this work under my father’s eye, Mr. Catterson Smith gained much skill and experience… .Had my father seen these reproductions he would have been well satisfied.Our copy of In the Dawn of the World is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.View other work by Edward Burne-Jones.View more Fine Press Friday posts. -- source link