Maggs Bros.

Evidently begun as a gift for Stephen Tennant, the project was completed in neither its paper nor bricks-and-mortar manifestations. The binding, half title, title page and dedicatory vignette are all completely finished, and to Rex’s highest standard, but the plans for the building consist only of a single pencil sketch. Ownership inscription of Laurence Whistler, the artist’s brother.Whistler’s friendship with the absurdly aesthetic Stephen Tennant was one of the more formative of his early years, bringing him on from son of suburban house builder to high society’s favourite painter, mixing with the brightest of the bright young things. They met at the Slade School of Art, and began an intense friendship, of which Whistler wrote “Thank God it grew and lasted all this time owing nothing to unhappy destructive sex”. An invitation to visit Tennant’s family home Wilsford over a weekend in 1923 was Rex’s introduction to the “life of a civilized country house which was to offer him so much that he enjoyed, and it could not have been done more aptly than in the serene Avon Valley, with the cool profiles of Salisbury Plain on either hand, where the love of beauty was assiduously cultivated.” [Laurence Whistler The Laughter and the Urn]. By 1928 the house was Stephen’s personal property and he began to establish his notoriously louche and idle lifestyle in “Palazzo Wilsford”. It seems that this incompleted gift was never presented to Tennant. In 1931 he was quite seriously tubercular and was in need of the sort of cheering up that the thought of such a project would bring. He was being looked after assiduously by Siegfried Sassoon, and in a familiar scenario Tennant’s friends believed that Sassoon was taking the opportunity offered by the illness to ward off potential rivals, keeping his beautiful (if effete) friend to himself.Whistler didn’t waste the efforts entirely, and some years later recycled the title page design to form the wrappers of the little periodical The Masque, altering it by the removal of lettering and the initials of S & R.