Undine

London / New York: William Heinemann / Doubleday, Page & Co., , 1909. A Masterpiece of Sympathetic Understanding"
Edition de Luxe
Signed by the Artist

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. FOUQUE, De La Motte. Undine. Adapted from the German by W.L. Courtney and Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London / New York: William Heinemann / Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909.

Edition de Luxe, limited to 1000 large-paper copies signed by the artist, this being copy no. 226. Quarto. Fifteen color plates mounted on brown art paper, with captioned tissue guards. Head- tailpieces.

Handsomely rebound ca. 1960 by Bayntun (Rivière) in full blue crushed levant morocco. Covers decoratively bordered in gilt, spine with five raised bands, decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, gilt board edges and turn-ins, cockerel end-papers, top edge gilt, others uncut. There is a very slight 2 1/2 inch crack on the upper joint (but still sound), otherwise a very fine copy. Housed in a fleece-lined, light blue cloth slip-case.

"With the aqueous world of Undine Rackham found an opportunity to revive and develop his earlier art nouveau linear decorative drawing. especially in the need to incorporate waves and water currents in his pictures. He was thus able to connect a felicitious quality of decoration into his plates, was well as a new feeling for flat pattern which harks back to fin de siècle without being too openly mannered" (Gettings, Arthur Rackham, p. 123).

"Although the waves and eddies of Undine bear the mark of Art Nouveau, the work was still another step forward for Rackham, the unity of conception in the line drawings and the colour plates, the assertion of contrast in the moods of the heroine, rendering it a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding" (Hudson, p. 80).

Latimore and Haskell p. 34. Riall p. 93.