Shakespeare: The Histories

WRIGHT, Lisa

Four original paintings in mixed media; 25cm by 25cm; all framed and glazed with total dimensions of 42 by 42cm. Signed and dated on the reverse of the frame by the artist. 1. Towards Battle 2. A Private Plea 3. Transparent Queen 4. Shadow of a Red Queen. The Histories was the result of a long term ambition of the Royal Shakespeare Company to create an in depth collaboration with an artist around a theatre production. It was intended for the artist to use the working process, the situations, characters and images of the History Cycle to create work that would survive independently of the productions, having its own meaning. Wright worked on these drawings during two years of rehearsals for the History Plays. Michael Bird states in his introduction to the book which accompanied the exhibition of The Histories at the Beardsmore Gallery in 2008 that we should "think of the subjects of these paintings, not as individual illustrations of the Histories but as generic visitants from their family tree: the defeated, the bereaved, the innocent, the unafraid- the children, in other words, of times and circumstances in whose historical mirror we see painted our own." After studying at The Royal Academy Schools, London, 1990-1993, Wright moved to Cornwall. Her work has featured in numerous solo and curated group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and is held in many important corporate and private collections. Her work on the 'Histories' culminated in an exhibition at the Roundhouse- which ran concurrently with the plays- and subsequently at the Royal Academy of Arts London. She has been consistently selected for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition for over 20 years and won The National Open Art Prize. The four paintings are sold together with the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the Beardsmore Gallery, London, 2008.

The Road to Oxiana

BYRON, Robert

First edition; 8vo; original blue cloth boards, with gilt lettering to spine in pictorial dust jacket. With 16 illustrations and 5 maps. Byron, who died young in the Second World War, was one of the Brideshead set immortalized by Evelyn Waugh, but he was also the foremost travel writer of his age. He is best known for The Road to Oxiana, a description of his journey in 1933-34 through modern Iran and Afghanistan. Paul Fussell recently suggested that "what Ulysses is to the novel and what The Waste Land is to poetry", Byron's book is to travel writing. Byrons work has cast a spell on English travel writing ever since, with Chatwin and Leigh Fermor, amongst many who have fallen under the spell. Fine, the cloth is very fresh and bright, very light spotting to the preliminaries. The fine dust jacket has had some small neat repairs to the spine ends and corners. A lovely copy very rarely found in this condition.