Creator
Joseph Pennell
Title
Autograph letter to Henry Harland, 16 April [1893]
Description
Joseph Pennell performed two invaluable services: introducing Beardsley’s work to British audiences through his 1893 article for The Studio and, also in 1893, introducing Beardsley himself to Henry Harland (1861–1905) with this note. (Appended to it is the signature of the writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Joseph’s wife). Like Pennell, Harland was a transplanted American—a novelist from Brooklyn who fell in love with bohemian Paris and modeled French attitudes (and moral latitude) when in London. This first encounter led to further meetings in Summer 1893 at Ste. Marguerite, near Dieppe, that united Harland, Beardsley, and John Lane of the Bodley Head firm in a new venture. In the following months, they laid plans for a clothbound quarterly magazine that would eschew “illustrations,” treating works of art as independent contributions, not as mere adjuncts to texts. Harland would be The Yellow Book’s literary editor, while Beardsley would oversee the art.
Source
From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press