War Drawings / by Muirhead Bone / Edition Deluxe / From the Collection presented to the British Museum by His Majesty's Government: P.14923-R

Acquisition and important dates

(1918) by Unknown

Dating

20th Century
Production date: AD 1918

Note

A facsicule of heavy green paper with buff paper spine with green cloth ties which contains ten loose sheets of prints (XLI-L), the titles of which are listed on the front cover below the series title and additionally on a title page inside. The Fitzwilliam Museum stamp at lower centre with handwritten date: '1917'. The handwritten date does not tally with the printed date of MCMXVIII [1918] on the front cover. One of six facsicules, each containing ten prints after drawings by Bone, all of which are contained inside a hard-backed portfolio covered in pale blue paper with dark blue spine and printed letters, 'War Drawings / by Muirhead Bone' and with green cloth ties. The portfolio also contains a single page of letterpress published for the War Office by Country Life which reproduces Press notices of ' "The Western Front"/ Drawings by Muirhead Bone'. The hard-backed portfolio was most likely custom-made for the full edition once all six parts had been published. The Fitzwilliam set should not be confused with the 'Edition de Luxe/Signed Proofs/Limited Issue' sets, of which only fifty were printed. The prints contained in the 'Signed Proofs' edition bear an additional pencil signature and the embossed monogram of the artist in the lower margin. Muirhead Bone was the first official War Artist, appointed by the War Office in July 1916, whose resulting drawings were presented to the British Museum. The Museum's Keeper of Prints and Drawings, Campbell Dodgson, collaborated with Wellington House, the Govenment's centre of propoganda, to issue two publications of the drawings; The Western Front: Drawings by Muirhead Bone, which was issued monthly in ten installments from December 1916 priced at two shillings per part, each containing twenty printed reproductions and War Drawings by Muirhead Bone, an 'Edition de Luxe' which consisted of a series of six folios of ten selected drawings reproduced on a larger scale and priced at 10/6 or half a guinea for each folio. Copies of these larger reproductions were also available through Bone's dealer, Colnaghi & Obach. By the end of the War, 30,000 copies of 'The Western Front' were printed, 12,000 of which were sold while the rest were distributed for free at home and abroad as propaganda. A special two-volume edition of the ten-part series, The Western Front: Drawings by Muirhead Bone was published in 1917 in New York by Doubleday & Page/George H. Doran with an introduction by Field-Marshall Sir Douglas Haig.

School or Style

British