Books

Aubrey Beardsley

En attendant 1894.
(Portrait of Enoch Soames, esq.)

Charles Hazelwood Shannon 1863 - 1937.
Lithograph. 37 x 28 cm. Delaney 67b. State iii: after the addition of the carnation.
One of five copies in grey. From the edition printed under the supervision of the artist.

Shannon made a series of portrait lithographs of his friends and artistic acquaintances, including John Gray, Sturge Moore, Llewellyn Hacon and, of course Charles Ricketts. Soames, never in any way an intimate of the Vale circle, was taken there once by Rothenstein, who announced that he had "brought with him the one man in London who could be counted upon to be boring." Ricketts hid in his study and refused to come out to meet the poet.
    Shannon's sketch of Soames standing in the back passage of the Vale formed the basis of a large, slightly dim and unsuccessful oil painting (present whereabouts unknown), the lithograph here reproduced, and a rather coarse joke told by Reginald Turner to Robert Ross and repeated in print several times by Frank Harris.