Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Answer to the Lyre: Richard Bentley's Illustrations for Thomas Gray's Poems

The Answer to the Lyre: Richard Bentley's Illustrations for Thomas Gray's Poems

Jestin, Loftus

Hardcover

Series: Anniversary Collection

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesIllustration

ISBN10: 0812281845
ISBN13: 9780812281842
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary
Published: Apr 29 1990
Pages: 362
Weight: 1.74
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

In 1753 Robert Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Sponsored by Horace Walpole, this luxurious quarto was the first major aesthetic expression of the Strawberry Hill circle and a landmark in English book illustration. Kenneth Clarke called it the most graceful monument to Gothic Rococo. Its witty interplay between illustration and text anticipated Blake, who studied it some thirty years later. Among its poems is Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Courtly Church-Yard.

Loftus Jestin offers a facsimile of Designs (out of print since 1786) and a full-length interdisciplinary study of the collaboration of Bentley, Gray, and Walpole that produced this extraordinary book. He shows the way poems and illustration at once complement, compete with and invigorate each other, and he examines Strawberry Hill. Walpole's house at Twickenham, where Bentley's genius flourished. He also considers the interplay of the sister arts in the work of Hogarth, Kent, and Pine, and surveys the tastes, friendships, economics, and politics that helped shape the development of Bentley's book illustrations.

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