A Cat Fit For A Library, And A Library Fit For A Cat

By Nancy Mattoon

Toff Relaxes With Another Carleton College Treasure,
A Bust Of Poet Friedrich von Schiller.
(Image Courtesy of Carleton College.)

On March 9, 2011 students, faculty, and staff at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota mourned the loss of one of the school library's most popular visitors. Toff the Cat, who died of cancer at age 14, had been adopted by the entire campus, but was especially popular with the literary set. His April 1st birthday was celebrated with book displays in the Laurence McKinley Gould Library, and his recommended reading list was an annual feature both there and at the campus bookstore.

Toff Enjoying One Of His Favorite Books.
(Image Courtesy of Carleton College.)

Toff began his days as a house cat belonging to the daughter of two Carleton professors, but his thirst for knowledge took him beyond the narrow confines of his birthplace. He spent over a dozen years on the Carleton College campus, got elected to student senate as a write-in candidate, was featured in the alumni magazine and on the school's website, and even appeared on postcards sold at the student bookstore. Sadly, he never completed a degree, despite attending classes and turning up at the library at all hours.

Toff's Birthday,
Celebrated With A Book Display At The Gould Library.
(Image Courtesy of Carleton College.)

Toff's late-night study habits resulted in a run-in with campus security on at least one occasion. According to the campus crime blotter, officers responded to a motion detector alarm tripped at the school's library around 3 a.m. The commander's official report outlines the cold, hard facts,"I began a search of the Libe only to locate the suspect on the second floor. Looking into the uncaring, unfeeling eyes of the suspect, I realized that Toff really has an attitude towards Security." (Toff found the atmosphere more welcoming at his other after-hours haunt, Northfield's Contented Cow pub.)

Toff Was Forever In Clover At Carleton.
(Image Courtesy of Carleton College.)

News of Toff's passing was covered by newspapers throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin, and his Facebook page has been filled with condolences. "I'll miss you waiting at the library doors for someone to let you in," one message reads. Another student notes she'll miss "the sound of his bell as he strolls through the Libe." Economics professor Martha Paas, one of Toff's housemates, summed up his rebellious appeal: "Even though there's a rule that animals may not go into [campus] buildings, it didn't apply to him because he was who he was."

In honor of Carleton College's beloved campus cat, and others like him, Booktryst is highlighting the brilliant creation of Belgian industrial furniture designer Corentin Dombrecht. His modular stairway to feline heaven, The Cat Library, was inspired by a video of Pages, a former stray from Valley Center, Kansas, who found a home at the Public Library. This ingenious bookcase will be on show at the 2011 Stockholm Furniture Fair. It features customized, kitty-sized stairs leading to a built-in, top-shelf lounging basket. Dombrecht notes that the prototype was, "Approved by Mitsu. My mother-in-law's cat." We bet Toff would have loved it.
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The Surrealistic Book Paintings of Alireza Darvish

by Stephen J. Gertz

Born in Rasht, Iran in 1968, graphic designer, illustrator, and animator Alireza Darvish attended the Fine Arts Institute in Teheran, 1984-88, and thereafter became one of Iran's foremost illustrators. He returned to the Fine Arts Institute as a painting and drawing teacher but in 1995 emigrated to Germany where he lived until 2003. Moving to Barcelona in 2003, he lived there for three years, building his reputation as an illustrator for various literary journals in Spain. He moved to Prague in late 2005 but soon returned to Germany where he now lives and works.

 

 In the early 2000s, he undertook a series of paintings, now numbering over forty, with books as thematic and metaphoric points of departure. Both playful and serious, light and dark, pensive and provocative, these paintings draw us into the world of books and readers within the subconscious in the surreal world.

Books as bridges across the unknown; as building blocks of the Pyramids; readers as fish in a desert with books as the water of life, their only chance to maintain themselves and survive, one book to the next.

 

Don Quxiote, the Man of La Mancha tilting at windmills and defending against lost causes becomes,  in Darvish's imagination, the defender of the book defying anyone to knock down the citadels of volumes that have towered over all but now need his services. He has become El Caballero de Libros,  a scrawny King Kong on skyscraper with a fly-swatter keeping the evil forces at bay.

The book as a solitary life-raft adrift and apart from the clamor of modern life...

...and as a dangerous burden we must bear on a tightrope.

Finally, readers languorously floating and swimming in books in an otherwise arid world.

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With thanks to Elmar Seibel of Ars Libri for leading me to Michele Roohani who led me to Alireza Darvish. All images courtesy of Alireza Darvish, with our thanks.

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Part Two: Book Artist Alireza Darvish's Battle against Censorship.

Full gallery of Alireza Darvish's book paintings here.
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New Book From Richard Minsky

by Stephen J. Gertz

Richard Minsky, the acclaimed book artist, has a new book.

The Book Art of Richard Minsky collects the artist's most influential pieces, those that changed the way artists make books. Including some of the least known masterworks from private collections, this volume presents the first comprehensive examination of a half century of Minsky's art.

A foreword by curator and historian Betty Bright, author of No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980, complements a first person narrative by Richard. He discusses the influences that shaped his life in art from early childhood onward. He also reveals key elements of his theoretical methodology that shaped the "material meets metaphor" works for which he is best known, as well as the principles of decorative art that inspired his integration of Constructivist and Art Deco strategies with Abstract Expressionist principles.

The book, a beautifully printed and embossed hardcover volume, is lavishly illustrated with full-color reproductions. A trade edition will be issued in June of this year at $34.95. A deluxe slipcase edition limited to 150 signed and numbered copies will also be released at that time, at $175.

However, the limited edition can be acquired for the pre-publication discount price of only $100 if ordered before an April 1, 2011 price increase.

Richard Minsky is widely acclaimed as a pioneering book artist whose work is collected internationally by major museums and libraries. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and the prestigious US/UK Bicentennial Fellowship, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts and The British Council.

In 2010 Yale University, the repository of The Richard Minsky Archive, mounted an exhibition of fifty years of Minsky's work.

Richard is the Founder of the Center for Book Arts (1974), which has mounted over 200 exhibitions during the past 35 years, and currently offers 100 classes and workshops. He has lectured at many institutions, including Brown University, The London College of Printing, Washington University, and The Wizard Academy.

He has published two limited edition volumes on American Decorated Publishers' Bindings, 1872-1929, which are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library, and other great institutions, and is the author of The Art of American Book Covers 1875-1920, published by George Braziller in 2010.

Click here for an extensive list of Richard Minsky's  activities.

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MINSKY, Richard. The Book Art of Richard Minsky. New York: George Braziller, 2011. Quarto (10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches. 136 pp. Color illustrations throughout. Trade edition $34.95. Limited edition of 150 signed and numbered copies $175, $100 if ordered by March 31, 2011.

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You will also enjoy reading:

The Breathtaking Book Art of Richard Minsky.

Genesis of a Book Artist: Booktryst Interviews Richard Minsky.

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Chinese Watercolors Spice Up The British Library

By Nancy Mattoon

Durian.
Native to Borneo, this greenish-brown fruit
is said to, "taste like heaven but smell like hell."
(All Images Courtesy of The British Library.)

Eight watercolors by an anonymous Chinese artist, created in the late 19th century, have recently been digitized on the website of the British Library. These historic paintings are botanical illustrations of spices, the most coveted commodity Asia had to offer the West in the 1800's, aside from opium. They are part of the Raffles Family Collection, which contains over 150 natural history and topographical drawings from Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as family correspondence and papers, and an important collection of diplomatic letters.

Nutmeg.
Nutmeg originates from the Banda islands
in the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia.

The watercolors are probably by Chinese artists based in Sumatra or Penang during the early 19th century, and identify fruits, herbs and spices which were central to the cuisine and culture of Southeast Asia at that time. These plants were used to flavor and preserve food, but were also found in herbal medicines, soaps, perfumes, and traditional handicrafts. Westerners introduced the plants to Europe, and the spice trade became the stimulus for much of the exploration of the New World which followed.

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
in an 1824 engraving.

The Raffles Family Collection documents the career of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), known for two major achievements: the establishment of Singapore in 1819, and, in 1826, founding the Zoological Society of London (later, the London Zoo). Raffles was born on a ship off the Jamaican coast, and spent most of his short life (he died of a probable brain tumor at age 45) exploring the lands he reached by sea. He lost both his first wife and four of his five children to various tropical maladies, but never wavered in his quest to discover and colonize new settlements for the British crown.

Turmeric.
Javanese turmeric is noted
for its deep yellow color.

An employee of the British East India Company, Raffles spent his whole career in Southeast Asia, in what are now the countries of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. He started out in Penang, and from 1811 to 1816 was Lieutenant-Governor of Java. His last posting, from 1817 to 1824, was to Bengkulu on the west coast of Sumatra. One of Raffles’ greatest passions, throughout his career in the Orient, was the study of natural history. He collected and documented both plant and animal specimens, and commissioned countless drawings of his discoveries, mostly from Chinese artists. He was also an amateur writer, publishing a history of Java in 1817. Over a half-dozen plant and animal species bear his name, including a woodpecker, an ant, a fish, a spider, and an entire genus of parasitic flowers, Rafflesia.

Rafflesia arnoldii, a parasitical plant native to Sumatra.
First discovered by a Malay servant, but attributed to Raffles,
who commissioned this print made by the
Weddell firm of botanical engravers in 1826.

Excruciating and near-constant headaches caused Raffles to leave Singapore in February of 1824. He packed his enormous collections from Sumatra and Singapore, including about 2500 natural history drawings, one-of-a-kind Malay manuscripts, and animals specially captured for the voyage, aboard the ship Fame, forming what he called a "veritable Noah’s Ark." The vessel set sail on the morning of February 2, 1824 and began its long journey across the seas to Britain. That evening, a drunken sailor set a brandy cask on fire, forcing an emergency evacuation of the ship. Miraculously everyone on board was saved, but passengers and crew watched helplessly from the lifeboats as the Fame was consumed by flames. Raffles and his family lost all of their personal possessions, the fruits of his years of research, his caged animals, and an irreplaceable collection of specimens.

Sunda wrinkled hornbill (male).
The hornbill is native to Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo.
This illustration from 1815 was by an unknown Chinese artist.

But in a testament to Raffles’ incredible determination, the very next day after his lifeboat reached Bengkulu, he began to rebuild his collection of scientific materials. He re-sketched his map of Sumatra, and found artists to recreate his natural history drawings. By the time he finally sailed for England just over two months later, Raffles had managed to accumulate 100 new drawings of plants, birds, and other animals. Together with an earlier collection from Penang, these works are now held in the British Library. The drawings have recently been fully described and illustrated in a published catalog: H.J. Noltie, Raffles’ Ark Redrawn: Natural History Drawings from the Collection of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: the British Library and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, in association with Bernard Quaritch, 2009).
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S.J. Perelman, Humorist, Cardiology a Specialty

by Stephen J. Gertz

So, you wake up at 12:20 AM in a sweat, dizzy, pressure in your chest. You've been here before, twenty-one years ago, when you were thirty-eight: you don't panic; you wait for the angina to pass. It doesn't. There must be one but you can't find a carotid or radial pulse. When you finally wrap your head around here-we-go-again heart attack, you call EMT. It's progressing, and, unlike earlier periods in life, you don't want to die. Not now. You're  just getting started.

Your heart is in V-Tak, but not just plain ol' everyday simple ventricular tachycardia; noooooo,  because it's you and only the weird will do, you have to have wide-complex supraventricular tachycardia, 183 bpm, maximum heart rate for a guy your age is 161, plus/minus 20, so no matter how you calculate you're over the speed limit, the drug x2 to bring it under control is no-go, the morphine x3 is not putting a dent in the pain, you don't remember the paddles and - CLEAR! - shock to bring the beater under control but it does after close to forty-five minutes of runaway freight train any instant V-Fib, you're dead, and next  you're in the cath lab because this kind of ventricular misbehavior is often associated with a massive coronary but it wasn't an infarct yet the last of three major coronary arteries that still functions is 90% occluded so a stent is inserted to prevent the inevitable and you're lucky to have not dropped dead, heart dying for a deep breath.

Question: When the paramedics were supporting your feeble efforts to walk from the bedroom to the gurney because your arms and legs were numb, you were too dizzy to solo, and you weakly mumbled, "grab that book," what book was it?

In the above, all too real scenario, your now thankfully alive and, miraculously, heart-undamaged correspondent opted for an anthology of S. J. Perelman's comic essays. If I was extremely lucky and it was going to be a very long night with a need for something to read in the CCU afterward, I wanted something to make me feel alive. If I was going to die, I was going to die laughing.

I blame Lorne Bair, Tom Congalton and Dan Gregory, of Lorne Bair Rare Books and Between the Covers, respectively, who recently acquired the library of the great art director and graphic artist, Ben Shahn, within which was a cache of Perelman firsts inscribed to Shahn by his good friend. Thank you.

The Rising Gorge
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.
Dust jacket design by Ben Shahn.

I see the Perelmans in their catalog and I'm transported to Cloudland and broad brain smiles. This is the writer I began reading as a kid when I noticed his name as co-screenwriter on a couple of Marx Brothers pics, the Marx Bros. being my older siblings in spirit, and who, by reading every prose work he ever wrote, collected in twenty-one books, taught me how to write because he was one of the finest writers the U.S. has ever produced and the 20th century's wittiest in English though he never wrote prose longer than the comic essay; a writer's writer who awed others, an obsessive craftsman who would take a day to compose a sentence to his satisfaction, possessed an erudition and  vocabulary second to none, luxuriated in language, had a sense of satire, parody and the absurd above and beyond, played with words like a kid in a sandbox, and had a gift for brilliant non-sequitors. 

His awestruck fans included E.B. White, Robert Benchley (who deferentially referred to Perelman as dementia praecoxswain), E.E. Cummings, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal; too many more to enumerate.  His literary brilliance was recognized by his peers. Oh, and Groucho, who blurbed of Dawn Ginsberg's Revenge (1929), Perelman's first collection, "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it."

"A knock on the door aroused Dawn from her lethargy. She hastily slipped it off and donned an abstraction. This was Dawn, flitting lightly from lethargy to abstraction and back to precipice again,. Or from Beethoven to Bach and Bach to Bach again."

Swiss Family Perelman
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950.

For Ben,
Another vignette of tsouris, self-
induced by one who modestly con-
siders himself an
expert at self-destruction.
Tout à vous,
Sid

Without Perelman, no Woody Allen fiction. In fact, without Perelman there is no modern, short comic essay, period. Mark Leyner's minor masterpiece, Einstein on the Phone - purported FBI wiretap transcripts of conversations between Albert Einstein and actress Mary Astor (they're lovers and he's jealous of her affair with playwright George S. Kaufman), who complains that she's not getting the credit she deserves for key aspects of his work, and Einstein and Meyer Lansky discussing gambling, odds, relativity, whether the universe is a crap-shoot and God is really playing dice - would never have been written without Perelman's lead. Too many others to note here. Suffice it to say, anyone writing humor pieces today owes a debt of gratitude to Perelman. It's unavoidable.

"What happens to you when you read Perelman and you're a young writer is fatal because his style seeps into you. He's got such a pronounced, overwhelming  comic style that it's very hard not to be influenced by him" (Woody Allen).

Why use  'kiss" when "osculate" so chewably fills the mouth and sounds so obliquely and innocently obscene? Perelman was the most literate American humorist of the 20th century and presumed that you weren't afraid to consult a dictionary. He respected your intelligence and that you were a reader. He was, in fact, the reader's humorist.

"People who like my work have to understand words and their juxtaposition as well as the images they create. It's very hard to make a person laugh who doesn't have inside him the words I use. My humor is of the free association kind, and in order to enjoy it, you have to have a good background in reading. It's a heavy strain for people to haven't read much."

Westward Ha!
Around the World in 80 Cliches.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948.
Drawings by [Al] Hirshfeld.

For Ben,
this somber record of escapism and
peevish ululation, with homage
Sid.

Not so by the way, Nathanael West (b. Nathan Weinstein) was his closest friend; they attended Brown together, and he later married West's sister, Laura. The overwhelming number of his comic pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker. He shared an Academy Award® in 1956 for his adapted screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days.

Significantly, Perelman was the first  writer in English to seamlessly integrate the language of high and low culture into his work, often gliding between the two within the same sentence deftly, with flair, easily without forcing it, a lesson lost on many of his heirs.

As for me, my 72-hour nightmare last week is summed-up by the title to one of Perelman's self-described feuilletons wherein reality and absurdity collide and  dine together over nice hot pastrami and delicate penne al pesto ala Pisa: Pulse Rapid, Respiration Lean, No Mustard.

Yet I was left with a condiment. Just prior to the tap into my right femoral artery at the groin to insert the catheter, a creative  prep nurse with razor and  wicked sense of humor shaved and left a landing strip where a  forest primeval once thrived.

Yes, it was a major, life-altering experience. I begin my new career as a male porn star next week.
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Book images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Like my humorists, I prefer my heart docs to be hyphenates. And so, I highly recommend Dr. Steven J. Levine, Cardiologist who saved my life - Restaurateur, owner of Wilshire in Santa Monica, California. You'll dine in a casually elegant atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, your host, Al Fresco. I figure order hearts of palm if on the menu, the healthiest in town, I'll bet.

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Mr. Small Goes To Washington

Unrivaled Collection of "Washingtoniana" Donated To D.C. University.

By Nancy Mattoon

Dinner Napkin: "Plan of the City of Washington, in the
Territory of Columbia" (n.d.).

Rare handkerchief map of the city of Washington based on the Samuel Hill engraving of Andrew Ellicott’s plan. Printed in red ink on cotton cloth. Allegorical corner vignettes of Indians, foliage, and a sailing ship. Printed in Boston and sold in Washington as a souvenir. Artist: After design of Andrew Ellicott; Publisher: Samuel Hill, Boston, Mass.

(All Images Courtesy Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection.)

A single man's lifelong dedication to collecting materials about his hometown is about to benefit scholars everywhere. Albert H. Small, a prominent Washington, D.C. real estate developer, has just donated his extensive archives of Washington history to George Washington University. He's also kicked in a little money to renovate a historic home to house his collection, $5 million to be exact. A career collector and philanthropist, Small received a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2009 from President Obama. This award was for "his devotion to sharing early American manuscripts with our Nation’s cultural and educational institutions... His generosity has helped educate countless Americans about those who founded our country."

Jigsaw Puzzle: "The Capitol at Washington,"
McLoughlin Bro., New York.
(Color Lithograph, 1888).
Lithograph used as a puzzle, mounted on cardboard, shows east front of Capitol with pedestrians and carriages.

According to Chris Coover, senior specialist, books and manuscripts, at Christie’s in New York, "Albert Small, a native Washingtonian, has methodically assembled the single most significant and extensive collection in private hands relating to the history and development of Washington and the District of Columbia. Small’s remarkable collection – some 50 years in the making and impossible to duplicate today – is a treasure trove of rare maps, drawings, letters and documents, lithographs, books and ephemera, and is a testament to his passionate enthusiasm as a collector."

Letter from George Washington
to Congress Dec. 13, 1791. (signed).

Text reads: "I place before you the plan of a City that has been laid out within the District of ten miles square, which was fixed upon for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States."

The collection is comprised of nearly 700 items, including a letter written by George Washington to Congress in 1791 outlining the ten square miles designated as the new capital city of the United States. James M. Goode, a historian who helped Small assemble many of the maps, prints and photographs in the archive explains, "He collects through auctions, print shows and catalogs. He must get 400 catalogs a year. The rarer the material, the more excited he gets. The Washington letter got away once. About 30 years ago the letter was at auction and... it went to Malcolm Forbes. When Forbes died, it went up on auction again and Mr. Small bought it."

Civil War Camp Flag. (1861, Wool Fabric).
This small U.S. flag was used before an officer’s tent in the field during the civil war. It is known as a camp flag. This example has a rare arrangement of 34 starts in a "circle-in-a-square" medallion. In the center is a large single star flanked by 3 stars, which form a "Y", surrounded by a wreath of 14 stars, the remaining line the border to create a square. Kansas was admitted as the 235th state in 1861 and West Virginia in 1863.
Flag should be displayed vertically.

Small was insistent that the collection be kept intact. "George Washington [University] has had a division on Washington history in their American Studies program for 40 years. He decided that was the best place for it because it will be used for research by the students," said Goode. George Washington University President Steven Knapp says the collection will provide "unparalleled opportunities not only for our current students and scholars but also for future generations to study the history of our nation through the study of this nation’s capital."

"Encampment Georgetown D.C. 1861."
(Watercolor by Augustus Kollner).

The donation to the University builds on Mr. Small’s long history of preserving and sharing America’s heritage. In 2005, he donated the earliest known image of the house at Washington D.C.'s 1600 Pennsylvania Ave– a watercolor done in 1801 by J. Benford – to the White House, where it now hangs. The University of Virginia was the recipient in 2004 of Small’s collection on the Declaration of Independence, where it is housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

"Bust Portrait of Abraham Lincoln."
Photographed by Alexander Gardner.
Black and White Photo, 18 Nov 1863.
Albumen print taken from original glass negative, limited edition of 75 copies #49.

Albert H. Small himself has spoken of the importance of his gift. "I have been building this collection for 50, almost 60 years. I wanted to place it somewhere where it could get the best exposure for people. George Washington is going to set up a program for the study of the collection. And every year another group of students will use it and it will be a continuing thing...Most people don't know this history. You can be an average person and not know anything about the history of the city. We have a real thriving capital now, but back in 1790 it was a swamp."

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Admiring George Morland's Ass

by Stephen J. Gertz

It's a great, Class-A ass, an ass to applaud, a Blue Ribbon ass, the ass of all asses,  an ass to be proud of, the ass to beat. It's George Morland's ass.

Morland's Ass.

In 1806, journalist, biographer, and historian Francis William Blagdon (1778-1819) published Authentic Memoirs of the late George Morland, comprised of fifteen pages of text accompanying twenty engravings after the work of late-eighteenth century British painter George Morland. It has become well nigh a rumor in its first edition. In 1824, a second (uniform) edition with all the plates hand-colored was issued; is merely scarce.

The book is bottom-heavy with asses.

Conversation.
(Ass mooning the conversationalists).

Of Blagdon and this book, Prideaux notes: "Even better are his Memoirs of George Morland, an admirable volume full of just yet not excessive appreciation, and now extremely scarce, owing to its being frequently broken up for the value of the plates. Of these, only one is in aquatint, the rest are in soft ground etching, mezzotint and stipple, the colour-printed mezzotints, rarely found associated with aquatint in illustration, being specially sought for" (p. 222).

"Blagdon's Memoirs of George Morland is an extremely rare book and I have had great difficulty in tracing copies to compare...In 1824, however, there was a definite uniform edition with 20 plates all colored. The title page is still dated 1806 and the plates still bear their original imprints but the watermark is J. Whatman Turkey Mills 1824" (Tooley).

The Rustic Hovel.

"George Morland (1763–1804), landscape and genre painter... His strict upbringing and enforced study in early childhood may account for his wayward and rebellious character in later life...In 1784, when his apprenticeship expired, Morland set up on his own account and moved out of the family home. Once freed from parental constraints, his life of extravagance, hard drinking, and association with low-life characters commenced. At first he was exploited by an unscrupulous picture dealer in Covent Garden, for whom he produced ‘galanteries’ of an immodest nature...

I Break For Horses.
(Horse and Ostler).
Don't know what the groom is, ahem, doing with his right hand
but the horse isn't happy about it.

"...In 1790 Morland seems to have made a conscious decision to change his subject matter from domestic and moralizing genre scenes, with a strong narrative content, to rustic genre subjects, notable for their conspicuous lack of incident. Humble life in the country became the hallmark of his paintings and was to remain his sole theme...

"Morland's work from 1790 to about 1794 was lively and fresh... His most enduring subjects were of farmyards, cottage scenes, stables, and country alehouses,..His achievement in his best work of the early 1790s was to offer the viewer a relatively unaffected representation of rural life and yet to do so in conformity with the standards of taste of the period that would have found ugliness offensive. His pictures can thus be described as having a ‘picturesque propriety’ that sets them apart from his contemporary landscape and genre painters...

Ass and Pigs.

"Morland's practice as an artist is important in that he was one of the first painters to break away from the traditional arrangements between artists and patrons. He produced his own designs, not relying on commissions, and sold directly to dealers, print publishers, or ‘agents’... Although this practice would have suited his recalcitrant, independent nature and preserved his artistic freedom, it was clearly to his financial detriment, for he had no head for business and was easily exploited. Moreover, his aversion to polite society meant that he missed out on important commissions... Despite his enormous output—probably in the region of 1000 paintings—his life of poverty and debt is evidence that the pictures were usually sold for little, or traded against debts...

An Ass Race.

"The last decade of Morland's career was one of decline, as drink, debt, and poor health took their toll on him...Morland's reputation in his own lifetime was high and based primarily on the large number of prints after his works...Morland's importance as an artist began to be reassessed somewhat in the last decade or two of the twentieth century... he is now regarded as an interesting minor master, much of whose work was innovative at the time in both subject matter and style and who can now be seen as a recognizable influence on both John Constable and David Wilkie" (Oxford DNB).

Extravagant, wayward, dissolute, rebellious. impecunious. Say what you will about George Morland but the man knew how to paint an ass.

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BLAGDON, Francis Wiliam. MORLAND, George. Authentic Memoirs of the late George Morland, with remarks on his abilities and progress as an artist; in which are interspersed a variety of anecdotes never before published; together with a Facsimile of his writing, specimens of his hieroglyphical sketches, &s. &c. The whole collected from numerous manuscript communications. London: Printed for Edward Orme… by Barnard and Sultzer, 1806 [i.e. 1824].

Second (uniform) edition. Oblong folio.  Hand-colored engraved portrait frontispiece, [1, titlepage], [1, blank], nineteen hand-colored engravings (including one aquatint) with guards, watermarked J. Whatman Turkey Mill 1820 and 1824, 3-15, [1, blank] pp., including three text engravings (text bound at rear).

The Plates:
1. George Morland. Publ. Jany. 1805 by Edwd.Orme.
2. A Mad Bull (aquatint by R. Dodd). Publ. Nov. 20, 1789 by P. Cornman and Republished 1805 by Edwd. Orme.
3. The Cottage Sty. Sold and published Jany. 1, 1804 by Edwd. Orme
4. Conversation. Published and sold by Edwd. Orme...July, 1, 1804.
5. (Rustic Scene - Two women, two men, & stile). Sold and Published June 4, 1804 by Edwd. Orme.
6. (Washing). Republished by Orme...Jany 1, 1799.
7. (Stable &c.). Sold and Publd. Jany. 1, 1793 by D. Orme. Republished by Orme Jany 1, 1799.
8. Morland's Ass. Published 1804 by Edwd. Orme.
9. Ass & Pigs. Published and Sold by edwd. Orme...Jany 1, 1804.
10. (Water Mill). Sold & Published...Septr. 1802 by Edwd. Orme.
11. (Rustic scene - Cottage and Cart). Sold & Publd. Jany 1, 1793 by D. Orme & Co....
12. (Rustic Bridge &c.). Sold & Published Jany. 1794 by D. Orme & Co...
13. (Horse and Ostler). Republished by Orme...Jany, 1, 1799. Sold and Published May 1, 1793 by D. Orme & Co...
14. (Pony figures in rain). Sold and Published June 4th 1804 by Edwd. Orme...
15. The Rustic Hovel). Sold and Published Jany. 1, 1804 by Edwd. Orme...
16. (Horse drinking). Republished by Orme...Jany. 1, 1799. Sold & Published May 1, 1793 by D. Orme...
17. Alehouse seat). Republished by Orme Jany. 1, 1799. Sold & Published May 1, 1793 by D. Orme...
18. (Two children picking flowers). Sold & Published...Septr. 1802 by Edwd. Orme...
19. (Haymakers by stile). Sold & Published Jany. 1, 1794 by Danl. Orme & Co. Sold & republished by Danl. Orme, Jany. 1, 1799.
20. An Ass Race. Pubd. Novr. 20 1789 by P. Cornman and republished 1805 by Edwd. Orme...

Prideaux, Aquatint Engraving,  p. 221-222. Tooley, English Books with Coloured Plaates 91. Abbey, Life in England, 208.

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