One of the rarest books in the Lawrence canon, not to be confused with the exhibition of 1927 which included all the pictures from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This first exhibition only featured the portraits of Middle Eastern sitters by Eric Kennington, including a few which weren’t used in Lawrence’s epic work.
Lawrence commissioned Kennington to travel to the Middle East in order to draw the principal figures of the Arab Revolt. Though now famous for illustrating the Seven Pillars, Kennington first executed the portraits when Lawrence’s masterpiece was “an unpublished book of mine … loose notes … an outside view, from an odd angle.” (p.7). Of the sitters, many of whom were great friends of his, Lawrence writes that Kennington faced a considerable challenge: “he was drawing odd people, who are very impatient of those they think fools, men without ties, or duties, or claims, rank individualists who cling to their barren country that they may owe nothing to any man, and be owed nothing in return.” (p.60).
The catalogue, in its various editions, also helped introduce Lawrence to other influential figures within the visual arts, such as H.S. Ede, best known for the house and art collection Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Ede, who had previously dismissed Lawrence as a war monger, was so struck by the prefatory note that he sent Lawrence a letter, thus beginning a long epistolary friendship (later published as Shaw-Ede by the Golden Cockerell Press in 1942).
Extremely rare in commerce, with no copies in auction records. The book avoided the attention of Duval, Gorman-Reed and Baxter; O’Brien, however, included it in his consummate bibliography. It is also institutionally scarce, with LibraryHub locating five examples in the UK, at the Courtauld, Oxford (Bodley has the Lawrence copy itself), Paul Mellon Centre, Tate and the V&A. The British Library list the 1927 catalogue separately, but either don’t have or don’t list the 1921. OCLC adds two more, at Harvard and the University of Texas (according to Wilson the manuscript of Lawrence’s introduction is also at Texas).
O’Brien, A032.
