Beauty's Daughters ... With an introduction by Fortunio Matania
London, John Long Limited, 1938.
Large quarto, [x] pages plus 48 full-page sepia-toned plates (fine photogravures by the Vandyck Printers Limited, Bristol).
Black cloth with silver lettering; extremities very lightly bumped; leading edge a little marked; an excellent copy with the pictorial dustwrapper a little rubbed, chipped and slightly scratched, with a few short tears.
The National Portrait Gallery has a lot to say about the British photographer Walter Bird (1903-1969): 'Sitter in 1 portrait. Artist associated with 1428 portraits. In the early years of his career Bird worked mostly on advertising commissions and portraits of actors, published in magazines such as Tatler and Theatre World. He published several books on photography including "Eves without Leaves" (1940), which proved popular with British troops during the Second World War. On the death of Walter Stoneman in 1958 Bird took over his position as chief photographer for J. Russell & Sons, purchasing the business in 1961. Bird superseded Stoneman as the official photographer for the National Photographic Record, initiated by the National Portrait Gallery in 1917 to record important and influential citizens'. It is only by reading between the leaves, so to speak, that one would appreciate that Bird's fame in the 1930s and the war years came from 'his romantic visualisation of the female form' (John Chillingworth), or his nude images of beautiful women.
Item #111937
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