Maggs Bros.

The original artwork for the dust jacket of the first American edition of Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in the Springtime, published by Doubleday Doran in 1939. The principal plot device is the kidnapping of The Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, and the drawing shows Uncle Fred peering through the curtains of Lord Dunstable’s suite at Blandings, where she is temporarily being closeted.

The rather wonderful Peggy Bacon (1895 - 1987), illustrator for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and of her own books, was in later life resident in Kennebunk, Maine, and this picture was bought from her by the great Wodehousian Charles Gould.

Present too, is Bacon’s TLS (“Peggy Bacon”) to Gould (also of Kennebunkport), written at the time of purchase (1981): “Many thanks for your check of $1,200 for “The Pig in the Parlour”, the pastel I did for the dust jacket of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred in the Springtime.” She promises to let Gould know if any of the preparatory sketches for it turn up (“although I doubt they still exist”), and concludes with her pleasure “that an appreciator of Wodehouse’s delightful work owns the pastel, and particularly someone who lives so near the Cape Porpoise house I have lived for the past twenty years.”