Sebastian van Storck

London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1927. Walter Pater's "Sebastian van Storck,"
Illustrated by Alastair

[ALASTAIR, illustrator]. PATER, Walter. Sebastian van Storck. With Eight Illustrations in Colour by Alastair and an Introduction by P.G. Konody. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1927.

Limited to 1,050 numbered copies (this copy being No. 40), each copy with one of the plates signed by the artist. Large quarto (12 3/8 x 10 1/8; 313 x 250 mm). 67, [1] pp. Eight color plates (including frontispiece). This copy with the third plate signed by Alastair in pencil.

Original cream-colored cloth lettered in gilt and pictorially stamped in brown. Spine lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Very minor rubbing to spine and extremities. A near fine copy. Publisher's parchment dust jacket. Housed in the publisher's brown slipcase with printed paper label. Slipcase lacking spine and with some wear to edges.

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894). English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction. From 1885 to 1887 Pater published four new imaginary portraits each set at a turning-point in the history of ideas or art. These imaginary portraits included Sebastian van Storck, a powerful critique of philosophical solipsism, and perhaps Pater's most striking work of fiction.

Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt; 1887-1969). German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. Mysterious, flamboyant, enigmatic and attractive to many people, he was born of German nobility in Karlsruhe. In his youth he joined the circus and learned mime. Shortly after leaving school he studied philosophy at Marburg University where he met the writer Boris Pasternak. He is best known as an illustrator. His drawings, which are often decadent in spirit and have the look of Art Deco, are considered "The legitimate successor of Aubrey Beardsley whose conventions served him not as models to copy, but as bases for new rhythms pulsing with strange nervous energy and sensibility" (Introduction).