Adrian Feint bookplates: Inside the cover, Carrick Hill
Bookplates, placed inside books and only visible to those who share your library, imply a certain intimacy.
One of the many pleasures of owning real books lies in having volumes that once belonged to other people: books originally bought by parents and grandparents, for example, are naturally precious. But those that bear the names of authors and scholars are also particularly appealing, especially if they are inscribed with the date and circumstances of their acquisition, or perhaps even with a dedication from or to another scholar.
I have, for example, a copy of Enoch Powell’s edition of Herodotus Book VIII, with a Latin dedication to his colleague Guy Manton written on September 4, 1939, three days after the invasion of Poland and one day after the declaration of war, implying that they might both expect to die in the imminent conflict: moriturus morituro.
Powell, a prodigiously brilliant student at Cambridge who had become at 25 the youngest professor of Greek to be appointed to the University of Sydney, had immediately resigned when war broke out to join the army. In the event, both survived, Powell to pursue a political career and Manton to become professor of Greek at the University of Otago and later dean of arts at Monash University.
Inscriptions and dedications, even annotations in the book itself, can be of great interest, but bookplates add another dimension. Not only do they identify the book as belonging to a particular individual’s library, they also contain images or mottos that have been chosen to express something about the interests or character of their owner.
Thus my copy of Alberti’s De pictura, the first work of art theory of the Renaissance, has a bookplate of the art historian who formerly owned it, with the slightly arch Latin motto Nil pluriformius amore: nothing is more various in its forms than love — a discreet allusion to sexual ambivalence.
Bookplates, sometimes known as ex libris from the Latin formula meaning “from the books of’’, are in fact a kind of mini art form in their own right, with their own distinctive material form, technical media, semiotic range, sociocultural role, and history. They originated in the 15th century, almost with the beginning of books, since it was the book that gave them their reason for being in the first place; in a sense the bookplate is a parasitic, if ornamental, growth on the book, as a vine is on a tree.
Bookplates have flourished ever since, although they declined with the rise of paperbacks in the 20th century, since there is no point in putting one in a book that is not designed to last. On the other hand, the popularity of bookplates as an art form and as objects of collection reached a peak just before the onset of this decline, in the first half of the 20th century, and that is precisely the time of Australia’s greatest bookplate designer, Adrian Feint, celebrated in an exhibition at Carrick Hill in Adelaide.
A bookplate is a kind of print that can be produced by either relief or intaglio means. Many of the most beautiful, including those of Feint, are made by wood engraving, but they can even be produced with linocut. One important consideration is that words must be engraved or cut in the same way as the image, not added in letterpress. So, technically speaking, although bookplates appear historically with or soon after books, they represent a more primitive means of printing. They are analogous to what was called a block book, where words and images were carved into a block and printed together.
Iconographically, the bookplate also has an interesting ancestry, originating in the Renaissance love of emblems, symbolic images that usually accompanied a motto and embodied a moral or philosophical concept. Emblem books were also a by-product of the invention of printing, but in content they arose from the Renaissance fascination with symbolic imagery and the belief, inspired by neo-platonic and occultist speculation, that images could convey complex knowledge or insight directly to the soul. Finally, from a sociocultural point of view, bookplates are a form that appeals to a relatively wealthy and cultivated audience.
But they are also a semi-private form, as in the case of the bookplate I mentioned earlier. Bookplates are placed inside books and are only visible to those who share your library or to whom books are lent, although for at least the past century and a half they have been avidly collected and often swapped — curiously anticipating the way paper works of conceptual art were often swapped between practitioners half a century ago.
For all these reasons, the making of a bookplate implies a certain intimacy and understanding between artist and client. The client chooses the artist for his excellence, but must approve the content of something that is going to articulate, even if confidentially, aspects of his character and beliefs. And the artist must be open to such collaboration and intuitive, able to come up with ideas, images and designs that the client could not have thought up alone.
All of these themes are visible at every point in this unusual and absorbing exhibition, which is based on a collection put together by Richard King and gifted to Carrick Hill, no doubt because the artist was a friend of the house’s original owners, Edward and Ursula Hayward, the friends and patrons of many Australian and British modernist artists. The exhibition includes plates made for Ursula, as well as her two sisters and their mother.
Adrian Feint himself (1894-1971) is represented in all the main public galleries of Australia, mainly with examples of the flower paintings on which he later concentrated, but also with landscapes, although in hindsight his bookplates are really his masterpieces. He began his studies in commercial art at a very young age, then studied at what is now the Julian Ashton Art School. By the 1920s, his remarkable talent was well recognised and he was kept busy between bookplates and his work first as a gallery director and later as the assistant editor of Sydney Ure Smith’s Art in Australia and a regular contributor to The Home, the most important cultural periodicals of their time.
The exhibition includes a selection of portraits of and paintings by close acquaintances of Feint, and has several portraits of the artist, including a youthful one by Thea Proctor (1926) in which he appears as an aesthete and something of a dandy, conscious of being remarkably handsome.
In Nora Heysen’s 1940 portrait, he assumes the role of the craftsman, dressed in a blue smock or overalls over a pink shirt and tie, holding a woodblock in one hand and an etching tool in the other; his expression is thoughtful, serious but rather remote.
The plates are as remarkable for their variety as for their quality. Feint seemed to be equally at home producing traditional heraldic ornamentation, bucolic or neo-romantic landscapes, or modernist decorative forms. His subjects do fall into certain broad categories, however. There are numerous flower pieces, often for women, including the family of Haywood as well as Margaret Preston. Here, Feint has taken his cue from the artist’s own style, as he has done in the two bookplates for Proctor, who initiated him as a young man into the secrets of interior decoration.
For men, there are often ships, including an unusual depiction of an aircraft carrier steaming straight towards us, made for a naval commander. And particularly charming, if predictable under the circumstances, are the interiors of libraries, with their reassuring shelves full of books and a comfortable armchair for the absorption of reading. Some of these interiors also have views through windows that evoke the mental space of the reader and in some cases the view, especially vistas of Sydney Harbour, can be the main motif.
The most interesting plates, of course, are those that are most personal or reflective of the client’s nature or interests, even if these are often enigmatic. Patrick White’s bookplate, for example, has a satyr pursuing a nymph in an idyllic landscape with a little temple, more like a folly from the grounds of a stately home, in the background. The motif seems to echo Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the layering of literary references is appropriate for an author, even if pursuing nymphs was neither White’s nor for that matter Feint’s particular interest.
The poet Dorothea Mackellar, long known to schoolchildren for her lines about the sunburnt country, has one of the most enigmatic designs, a centaur rearing on its hind legs and spreading its arms in exultation. It holds pipes in one hand, clearly alluding to either music or poetry; perhaps the figure suggests that a woman poet is like a mythical hybrid, or perhaps it is an evocation of longed-for but unattainable freedom.
Even more puzzling, and once again strikingly recalling the emblem tradition of the Renaissance, is the plate for Alice Muskett, a painter I mentioned a few weeks ago in discussing the Intrepid Women exhibition at Sydney’s SH Ervin Gallery. Muskett was, like Feint, a pupil of Julian Ashton, although she was 25 years his senior and in fact one of Ashton’s first pupils when the school started. By the time Feint produced her bookplate she would have been in her later 50s and seemed to be spending more time writing than painting.
Muskett’s emblem, for it seems fair to call it that, is a hunting falcon, a fierce and deadly creature, but here shown perched on a branch, its head covered by the hood which makes it quiescent, for it can see nothing.
The image is serene, but it is impossible to ignore the sense of potential somehow blocked or frustrated, and the symbolism is made more explicit by the two fine chains by which the bird is attached to the branch. These are memorable images, and it is hard not to feel that Feint felt an affinity with the reticences and repressions, sexual or professional, that weighed on these women’s lives.
A number of Feint’s friends and clients were, like himself, young gentlemen who were not of the marrying kind, in whose bookplates languid youths appear reading and lounging in romantic postures.
These images have a kind of discreetly transgressive, self-consciously sophisticated and at the same time nostalgic quality characteristic of the 1920s, a world that had already disappeared by the time Evelyn Waugh looked back on it in Brideshead Revisited (1945).
Feint’s own bookplate thus has a view of Sydney Harbour, perhaps with Rose Bay Convent in the distance, but with the addition of a slender youth in the foreground: a wistful dream that would be perfectly intelligible to those intimate enough with the artist to be allowed to leaf through his library.
Inside the cover: the bookplates of Adrian Feint
Carrick Hill, Adelaide, to June 30