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Summary
Author: Byron, Robert, and Rice, David Talbot
Title: The birth of Western painting. A history of colour, form, and iconography, illustrated from the paintings of Mistra and Mount Athos, of Giotto and Duccio, and of El Greco.
Publication: London, George Routledge & Sons Ltd 1930.
Price: Sold
Reference: 10488
Full Description
Large 4to. xvi + (2) + 236pp, 94 photo plates (with facing explanatory text). Publisher’s cloth, with imitation vellum spine (the spine somewhat soiled). One of 650 numbered copies for sale in England. Original printed prospectus (4pp) loosely inserted, and front and back covers of original dustwrapper trimmed and affixed to endpapers. Typed letter, signed, from Robert Byron, to an unidentified friend, dated 20 November (1930), also inserted. Jill Allibone’s copy, with her bookplate. Slight abrasion on outer margin of front free endpaper, otherwise a good copy.
First edition of this influential book by the writer and traveller Robert Byron (1905-1941) and his friend and fellow Byzantinist David Talbot Rice (Byron was primarily responsible for the text and Talbot Rice took the photographs on which the plates are based). It contains an inserted typed letter by Byron to a now unidentifiable friend (the name of his correspondent has been snipped away), dated 20 November, thanking this friend for a letter of congratulations about the book - apparently the first one received by Byron apart from one from Lady Cunard - and stating that the book "is the first more or less satisfactory thing I have done" and that "I do think it is beautifully produced - Routledge’s were stingy over nothing". Byron also records, in his characteristic vein of sardonic humour, "I am suffering from a lunch-party of bloodhound maniacs who have just gone off trailing Lucy [Byron’s sister] with the brutes. She has stationed herself in the mortuary of the local hospital in case of accidents". No letter relating to the publication of this book seems to have been available to James Knox for his extensive biographical study of Byron, published in 2003.