Pan (god) – { feuilleton }

Thomas Mackenzie’s Crock of Gold

Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was an English illustrator whose work has appeared here before via his illustrations for a verse rendering of the Aladdin story by Arthur Ransome, a typical product of the 1920s’ boom in illustrated children’s books. James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold (1912) is a vessel of a different kind, too sophisticated for children yet suffused with a fairy-tale quality, this is more like a fable for adults:

A mixture of philosophy, Irish folklore and the “battle of the sexes”, it consists of six books, Book 1 – The Coming of Pan, Book 2 – The Philosopher’s Journey, Book 3 – The Two Gods, Book 4 – The Philosopher’s Return, Book 5 – The Policemen, Book 6 – The Thin Woman’s Journey, that rotate around a philosopher and his quest to find the most beautiful woman in the world, Cáitilin Ni Murrachu, daughter of a remote mountain farm, and deliver her from the gods Pan and Aengus Óg, while himself going through a catharsis. (more)

The illustrations, which Mackenzie created for a 1926 edition, are a little different to his earlier work, tending in places towards that Hellenic stylisation that became increasingly popular in the graphic art of the 1920s and 30s. The depictions of Pan remind me that I once tried to catalogue all the appearances of the god in prose and poetry from the 1890s on. The years from 1890 to 1930 saw Pan become a persistent presence in English literature, while also giving a title to one of the leading Jugendstil journals. The idea of trying to document all this activity is an attractive one until you set to work and find that there are many more examples than you imagined, not all of them indicated in the titles of the works.

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The art of Paul Thévenaz, 1891–1921

This portrait of Jean Cocteau by Swiss artist Paul Thévenaz isn’t included in the artist’s memorial book, Paul Thévenaz, A Record of His Life and Art (1922) which was published after Thévenaz died suddenly at the age of 30. Everything else in this post is, however, and there’s more in the book itself which shows Thévenaz ranging through society portraits (and self-portraits), designs for the theatre (I’ve included a Salomé below), murals and sketches.

Thévenaz is another candidate for the pantheon of lost gay artists although the work in the book isn’t especially homoerotic. There are fauns, however, which might be connected to his romantic association with poet Witter Brynner. The latter’s A Canticle of Pan was written in 1918, and is one of the many manifestations of the horned god in the literature of the period. As for Thévenaz, I like his drawing style a great deal; in places it resembles Wyndham Lewis in its sweeping curves and stylisations. (Thanks to Callum for the tip!)

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Edmund Dulac’s Tanglewood Tales

Another Dulac I’d not seen before, and what an exceptional edition it is. Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling of Greek myths, a popular book for children that’s been through many reprints. Dulac’s edition dates from 1918, with the illustrations combining some of the stylisation of Greek art with Dulac’s own derivations from Persian miniatures. This might seem odd historically—the Greeks and Persians were enemies, after all—but every plate is a beautiful piece of work. Collectors of Pan imagery should note a fine example in the twelfth painting.

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The Reflected Faun

Another one to add to the stock of fauns, satyrs and Pan figures that proliferate from the 1890s to the 1920s, Laurence Housman’s The Reflected Faun appeared in The Yellow Book in 1894. The magazine’s publisher, John Lane, also published Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan in the same year although an early version of Machen’s story had appeared a few years before. What’s notable about Housman’s drawing is the way he combines in a single image several distinct themes: Faunus/Pan, the reflected Narcissus, and all those tales of beguiling spirits lurking in water. The nature of the spirit in this picture is distinctly androgynous, a detail that wouldn’t have impressed those critics who considered The Yellow Book to be an unwholesome publication. The androgyny may be taken as deliberate: Housman was one of London’s “Uranian” artists, and a few years later joined George Cecil Ives’ Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for gay men and lesbians. In the light of this, the drawing might be interpreted as a symbol for a clandestine existence where true desires remain buried or submerged.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aubrey Beardsley’s Keynotes
• In the Key of Yellow
• Ads for The Yellow Book
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• The Great God Pan
• Peake’s Pan

Aubrey Beardsley’s Keynotes

Promotional poster.

Keynotes was a series of 34 novels and short story collections published by John Lane from 1893. Aubrey Beardsley produced cover designs and embellishments for 22 of the titles in 1895 while he was working on The Yellow Book which John Lane was also publishing. Beardsley’s designs comprised a title frame with illustration or decoration which was blocked in gold on the cover and also used as a title page. For 15 of the titles he also created a series of key-shaped monograms for the authors, designs which were used on the spines and the backs of the books. Collections of Beardsley’s art often show one or two of these pieces but you seldom see them all, and even when the title frames are reproduced the type is often omitted.

Keynotes Series of Novels and Short Stories was a small book published in 1896 intended to gather all the Beardsley designs in one place and also promote the series in general. Two of the most celebrated works to receive the Beardsley treatment are those by Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, and The Three Imposters. The decoration for the latter gives no indication of the horrors lurking inside that volume, while the faun on The Great God Pan is a world away from the amorphous nightmare in a story that caused considerable outrage at the time. According to Stanley Weintraub’s biography, the Keynotes series was very popular despite (or because of) the stir it caused, and helped keep Beardsley’s work visible when many of his other illustrations were out of circulation.

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