The Little Holland House Album. With an introduction & notes by John Christian. The Roxburghe Club: 2024

The Little Holland House was compiled by Edward Burne-Jones in about 1858–9 for Sophia, MrsDalrymple, the youngest of the seven celebrated Pattle sisters who played such an important role in mid-Victorian cultural life. Their centre was Little Holland House in Kensington where another of the sisters, Sara Prinsep, created an artistic and intellectual salon around her permanent guest, the painter G.F. Watts. Other habitués included Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin, Carlyle, Holman Hunt, D.G. Rossetti and Du Maurier. Many of them were brilliantly photographed by yet another of the sisters, Julia Margaret Cameron.

 

The album was presented to Sophia Dalrymple, who became a close friend of the artist, dates from about this time. It consists of eight poems, all
transcribed by Burne-Jones and illustrated by him with drawings and vignettes, together with separate designs on the endpapers. The poems –which include works by Rossetti, Browning, Tennyson and Keats, and the ballad Sir Patrick Spens – provide an illuminating cross-section of the circle’s literary taste. The drawings are meticulously worked in pen and ink, Burne-Jones’s favourite medium at this period, and are often closely related not only to better-known examples of his own early work but to contemporary designs by Rossetti. Altogether the album makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this fascinating phase of Pre-Raphaelite activity.

 

The album was first published in 1981 in an edition of 200 copies by the twenty-one-year old Robert Dalrymple. He has now prepared a revised
and expanded edition for the members of the Roxburghe Club, which, more than forty years on, reflects both the advances in printing technology
and his subsequent career as a celebrated book designer.

 

150 copies have been printed, of which 75 are offered for sale, bound in quarter cloth with patterned paper boards, at £75.00
The Roxburghe Club, 2024 · 56pp · 305 x 212mm. ISBN 978 1 901902 19 8

Stock Code: 254188