Cover design by Laurence Housman for his own book, “A Farm in Fairyland”.

Binding for Laurence Housman’s A Farm in Fairyland

Laurence Housman, designer; signed in bottom right hand corner.

1894

Ink blocking, with a gilt overlay, on pale green cloth.

7¾ x 5¼ inches

One of Housman’s figurative designs, this binding exemplifies his expressive distortion of forms, which are elongated and treated decoratively. The composition is an interesting fusion of stylistic tendencies: the airless treatment of space and tendency to flatten the planes into a pattern are closely linked to second stage Pre-Raphaelitism. [commentary continued below]

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Photograph and text by Simon Cooke

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Here the emphasis on honest labour, symbolized by the ploughman and his plough, are redolent of the value systems of Morrisonian Arts and Crafts; while the curvilinearity and abstraction of the trees and furrow are unmistakeably in the style of British Art Nouveau. Housman playfully synthesizes these features into a new, organic whole while urbanely pointing to the tensions at work within his scheme. It is noticeable, for example, that he places a long-tailed bird, not quite a peacock, on the cross-beam of the plow, so uniting the functionality of an implement with the studied uselessness of pure beauty: Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and the lingering trace of Aestheticism in one subtle image.

References

Housman, Laurence. A Farm in Fairyland.Written, illustrated and in a binding by Housman. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1894.

Last modified 17 February 2014