Wilde Oscar

1894 · ref. 149906 — London: John Lane at the Sign of the Bodley Head 1894. Attractively bound First edition trade issue one of 500 copies printed; a further 50 copies were also issued on handmade paper. An attractively bound copy with the bookplate to the rear pastedown of the eccentric sportsman and artist William Eden 1849-1915 father of future Prime Minister Anthony Eden and who like Wilde had a dispute with the artist James McNeill Whistler. Eden excelled at a range of sports from boxing and horse riding to shooting "the epitome of the sporting squire" ODNB a member of several clubs and well known in London society. So too was he a keen amateur artist and aesthete building a fine collection of paintings and was a member of the aristocratic group The Souls. The contrast between the sportsman and the aesthete has been noted: "There was little that was harmonious in his nature and the aesthetic side warred with and exacerbated rather than complemented his athleticism making him a bored sportsman and a militant aesthete. As he grew older the world's failure to correspond to his ideals drove him to furious rages and the debased taste of humanity confirmed his atheism - for how could a God have made such a botch of things" ibid. His dispute with Whistler was occasioned when Eden commissioned a portrait of his wife which Whistler executed but then kept the cheque without handing over the painting leading to a legal case which resulted in Whistler's book The Baronet and the Butterfly 1899. Wilde too had a lengthy rivalry with Whistler out of the courts but with very public sparring. Small quarto 204 x 148 mm. Early 20th-century pink straight-grain morocco for Hatchards of Piccadilly spine lettered in gilt pink cloth sides marbled endpapers top edge gilt pink silk page marker. Bound without initial blank. A few pencilled lines in margins. Spine lightly sunned very light rubbing at extremities slight split in hinge preceding dedication leaf contents clean; an excellent copy. Mason 364. hardcover