Cuthbert and the Dogs
Melbourne, Digest Juvenile Productions, [1948].
Oblong imperial octavo (190 × 275 mm), [32] pages with numerous illustrations in black and white and colour (including a superb centrespread).
Quarter light blue cloth and colour pictorial papered boards; cloth a little flecked, with the ends a little rubbed and with minor loss of colour; papered boards a little rubbed at the extremities, with minor wear to the corners and a few trifling surface blemishes; early ownership signature on the title page; pastedowns a little marked, with the adjacent pages (the title page and the last page of text) a little foxed and offset; a very good copy.
Ethel Louise Spowers (1890-1947), Melbourne-born artist and printmaker, 'undertook (1911-17) the full course in drawing and painting at Melbourne's National Gallery schools.... Her first solo exhibition, held in 1920 ... showed fairy-tale drawings influenced by the work of Ida Outhwaite. In 1921-24 Spowers worked and studied abroad ... [in London and Paris].... Two further solo shows (1925 and 1927) at the New Gallery, Melbourne, confirmed her reputation as an illustrator of fairy tales, though by then she was also producing woodcuts and linocuts inspired by Japanese art and covering a broader range of subjects. A dramatic change in Spowers' style occurred in 1929 when she studied under Claude Flight (the leading exponent of the modernist linocut) at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London.... In the 1930s her linocuts attracted critical attention for their bold, simplified forms, rhythmic sense of movement, distinctive use of colour and humorous observation of everyday life, particularly the world of children.... In the late 1930s she stopped practising as an artist due to ill health, but continued her voluntary work at the Children's Hospital. She died of cancer on 5 May 1947' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). She had destroyed many of her paintings in a bonfire; today her work, in particular her Grosvenor School prints, fetch extraordinary prices. This charming children's book, published a year after she died, incorporates all of the above qualities, and is a more affordable work on paper. Muir 7032 (calling in error for [28] pages).
Item #101233
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