French Revolution, The

London: Chapman and Hall, 1910. Teeming with Colourful Scenes of Dramatic Events
and Imaginative Portraits of the Leading Revolutionaries"

[SULLIVAN, Edmund J., illustrator]. CARLYLE, Thomas. The French Revolution. A History. With Illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan, A.R.W.S. London: Chapman and Hall, 1910.

One of 150 numbered copies, signed by the artist (this being copy No. 92). Two quarto volumes (11 x 7 1/2 inches; 280 mm.). xii, [2], 418; xi, [1, blank], [2], 484 pp. Thirty-three black and white plates and 124 text illustrations. Title-page printed red and black.

Original quarter vellum over natural linen boards. Front cover and spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Spines very slightly soiled, corners lightly bumped. Otherwise a near fine set.

"Not a work of scholarship but a prose epic, teeming with colourful scenes of dramatic events and imaginative portraits of the leading revolutionaries. The book at once captured the English-speaking world, and has, outside France, moulded popular conceptions of the French Revolution down to the present day" (Printing and the Mind of Man 304, describing the 1837 first edition).

Edmund Joseph Sullivan (1869-1933), aka E. J. Sullivan, was a British book illustrator who worked in a style which merged the British tradition of illustration from the 1860s with aspects of Art Nouveau. The son of an artist, Sullivan decided to concentrate on graphic design and book illustration, which was flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century. Sullivan worked at the Daily Graphic from the age of nineteen, moving to the Pall Mall Magazine in 1893. During this period he produced standard news and portrait illustrations, but began to work on illustrations to literature at the Magazine. He soon graduated to the more prestigious role of book illustrator, producing illustrations. for editions of Lavengro and the plays School for Scandal and The Rivals. Sullivan's style is comparable to that of Aubrey Beardsley. Sullivan adapted his style to use the faux-Rococo techniques he had developed combined with bizarre images of strange fantastical figures, drawing on the genre of the grotesque.

"Sullivan's career as an illustrator was one of the most substantial and distinguished in the annals of English art" (Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England, p. 187).