Edwin Austin Abbey

Catalogue entry

N03987 ILLUSTRATION TO ‘SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER’ c. 1882–7
 
Inscr. ‘E. A. Abbey’ b.l.
Pen and ink, 9 7/8×11 5/8 (25×29).
Presented by a group of admirers through John Singer Sargent 1924.
Coll: Mrs E. A. Abbey.
Exh: (?) R.A., winter 1912 (360), as ‘Mr Marlow, I'm proud of bringing two persons of such merit together’.
Lit: Lucas, 1921, 1, pp.124–5, 159.
Repr: Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, 1887 (1st ed.) and 1901 (8th ed.), p.81.

This and the following illustration (N03988) were done for an edition of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which was first published with illustrations by E. A. Abbey in 1887. N03987 relates to the passage ‘Give me leave to introduce Miss Constance Neville to your acquaintance’, although at the R.A. memorial exhibition, 1912, it may have been shown with another caption.

The drawings for this series of illustrations were begun at the end of October 1882; twelve were nearly completed by December that year and by February 1887 the whole suite was finished. From December 1884 to August 1886 the series was published at irregular intervals in Harper's Magazine.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I

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