{"product_id":"savoy-4pf9hgm5","title":"The Savoy.","description":"\u003cp\u003eWithin three months of the shake-up of \u003cem\u003eThe Yellow Book\u003c\/em\u003e that had cost Beardsley his job, Smithers had launched its rival. It was both stylish and dangerous, named after the Savoy Hotel, near where Smithers’ offices had been, and which had been a favourite venue for some of Wilde’s liaisons, and defiantly intended to “pick up the discarded banners left by the retreat of \u003cem\u003eThe Yellow Book\u003c\/em\u003e into respectability” (Weintraub, introduction to the selection published in 1966). Arthur Symons was responsible for the textual side of the journal, and was every bit as defiant and unconvention - al as Beardsley: in the Editorial Note for the second number he speaks of \u003cem\u003eThe Savoy\u003c\/em\u003e’s reception as being “ … nonetheless flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable.” Smithers became Beardsley’s most loyal patron for the rest of his short and intense career, and the Savoy presented a vehicle for him to restore his reputation as the most brilliant graphic artist of his generation, in which he succeeded famously, combining his mis - chievous and subversive wit and mastery of line. You can never be quite sure what you are looking at in these mature drawings: every swelling is suggestive, and every smile is ambiguous: even after John Bull’s modest erection was removed from the prospectus, the drawing still speaks of a ponderous and ominous sexuality, and is the Madonna in the Christmas card really raising an eyebrow at the viewer; is the head of the self-portrait in “A Footnote” really meant to be that phallic? Beardsley’s brilliance overshadows what would have been a significant journal even without him. Conder, Rothenstein, Beerbohm and Pennell were among the other illustrators, and besides Symons there are important contributions from, inter alia, Yeats, Joseph Conrad (his short story “The Idiots”), Ernest Dowson and Theodore Wratislaw.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Beardsley Christmas card is loosely inserted. In cloth clamshell box with leather spine label. Extremely nice set, with some tears to yapp edges of wrappers of Nos. 3-8 and small ink stains to wrappers of one number.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Maggs Bros.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47857952063645,"sku":"238055","price":4300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0669\/0045\/9677\/files\/Savoyph1-6.jpg?v=1777372834","url":"https:\/\/store.maggs.com\/products\/savoy-4pf9hgm5","provider":"Maggs Bros.","version":"1.0","type":"link"}