Jim Dine

Dorian Gray at Opium Den from "The Picture of Dorian Gray" surreal portrait

1968

Rumpelstizchen, the antagonist of the Grimm Brothers' eponymous fairy tale, is pictured here at the moment of his escape from the queen. After helping a desperate maiden spin straw into gold in exchange for a promise, he has returned to claim that now-queen's first-born child. Her only hope is to guess his name, and when she speaks it aloud, he flies into a rage and escapes on a soup ladle. Hockney emphasizes the creature's diminutive stature by placing him on an outsized spoon against a menacing, inky background. There's a sense of a set or stage, of puppetry or of silhouettes, that is enhanced by how the artist has defined the cooking fire in shades of grey that look like layered cutouts. Sheet from "Rumpelstizchen” story (from Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm) Text printed letterpress and “Riding Around on a Cooking Spoon" etching and aquatint on W S Hodgkinson paper watermarked "DH" and “PP" Etching 6.25 x 9.8 in. / 16 x 25 cm Paper 17.5 x 12.25 in / 45 x 31 cm Unsigned: apart from the published edition of 400 books and 100 portfolios. This is one of eleven images recently found in our archive which we have decided to make available. There is one only of each image. This print from our publisher's archives is one of thirty-nine etchings from David Hockney’s 1969 "Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm". Hockney worked on this series with Paul Cornwall-Jones at Petersburg Press over the course of a year. 400 books and 100 portfolios plus artist’s proofs were printed. The artist illustrated six stories: 'The Little Sea Hare', 'Fundevogel', 'Rapunzel', 'The Boy who left Home to learn Fear', 'Old Rinkrank' and 'Rumpelstilzchen'. According to Hockney, "They're fascinating, the little stories, told in a very, very simple, direct, straightforward language and style, it was this simplicity that attracted me. They cover quite a strange range of experience, from the magical to the moral." He was inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, including Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, but Hockney reimagined the stories for a modern audience. The frontispiece for the project pictures Catherina Dorothea Viehmann, the elderly German woman who recounted fairy tales to the Grimm brothers when they were in their late twenties. In Hockney's words: “The stories weren’t written by the Brothers Grimm…they came across this woman called Catherina Dorothea Viehmann, who told 20 stories to them in this simple language, and they were so moved by them that they wrote them down word for word as she spoke.” Hockney drew the German woman in the style of Dürer, formally posed yet naturalistic against an impeccably crosshatched swath of grey. Hockney wrote about the surreal plots contained in the Brothers Grimm tales: “…the stories really are quite mad, when you think of it, and quite strange. In modern times, it’s like the story of a couple moving into a house, and in the next door’s garden they see this lettuce growing: and the wife develops this craving for the lettuce that she just must have and climbs over to pinch it, and the old woman who lives in the house next door says well, you can have the lettuce if you give me your child, and they agree to it. And if you put it into terms like this and imagine them in their semi-detached house agreeing to it all, it seems incredible.” Hockney enhanced this unbelievable quality with his illustrations which traverse inky, dense areas of intense crosshatching and minimalist line work. Rather than serving as direct interpretations of the plot, the images capture moments and feelings. Some portray the magic yet mundane -- Rapunzel's tiny face gazing placidly at a well-tended garden, or project danger and unease as in The Haunted Castle, with its citadel perched atop craggy rocks, dramatically lit against a dark sky. Hockney's sense of humor comes through in Cold Water About to Hit the Prince, in which a man tucked into bed stares straight at a rush of water drawn with a splash (this technique is likely Spit Bite, and the resultant bold spattered brushstroke contrasts beautifully with the rest of the carefully crosshatched image). A Wooded Landscape, with its lush textures, conveys the bucolic setting of a fairy tale and the potential danger hidden within the woods -- the viewer is left to wonder who lives on the hilltop in that diminutive cabin. These etchings defy the conventions of beautiful fairy tale illustrations...

Sheet from “The Little Sea Hare” story (from Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm) Text printed letterpress and “The Boy hidden in a Fish" e...

Richard Hamilton began studying James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) during his national service in 1947. Hamilton was inspired by the idea of illustrating Joyce’s complex, experimental novel in and began making sketches the following year, only to put the project to one side in 1950, with no publisher willing to front the exorbitant cost of resetting the novel for illustrations. It was not until 1981 that he made the decision to create one illustration for each of the novel’s eighteen chapters, and a nineteenth image – a portrait of one of the novel’s main protagonists, Leopold Bloom – destined as a frontispiece. He conceived these images as large intaglio...

The Cook (Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm) Etching and aquatint on W S Hodgkinson paper watermarked "DH" and "PP" Etching 7.3 x 7.9 in. / 18.6 x...

A contemporary of David Hockney and Peter Blake, Colin Self is an important British printmaker whose innovative etching techniques and novel use of found materials have defined his d...

A woman in slip-on heels leans languidly on a cloud-like phallus defined with loose, sketched lines. Gazing dreamily past the viewer, the topless woman dons a diaphanous tutu, and at...

The Box at 'Faustus'. 1929. Drypoint. 11 x 8 7/8. Edition 100, #39. Signed, titled, and numbered in pencil. A rich impression printed on the full sheet of pale blue/green-toned wove paper. Signed in pencil. A tongue-in-cheek image of the devil in the opera box...

The Wheel. 1927. Etching. Hurst 196. 9 x 10 (sheet 11 13/8 x 16 3/4). Trial proof 5, apart from the edition of 75. Illustrated: Print Collector's Quarterly 25 (1938): 292. A rich impression with tonal wiping. Printed on the full sheet of cream laid paper with deckle edges. Signed and annotated 'trial' and 'trial 5' in pencil. Housed in a 16 x 20-inch archival mat. In 1922, after a meeting with the etcher James McBey, Briscoe returned to etching once more producing plates of some of his sea sketches. The two artists sailed together in Briscoe's, forty-ton yacht, the "Golden Vanity...

Wonderful mezzotint and etching on China paper applied. The inscription reads: "Le matin/ J. J. Tissot Sc. et ex. 1886". Titled, signed and dated on plate on the lower margin, below ...

Image dimensions: 10.5 x 9.5 cm. Face of Young Man is a splendid engraving realized by the Belgian artist Edmond Marie Gabriël Van Offel. It is signed in pe...

Male Portrait is a splendid etching and drypoint signed on the lower left inside the matrix “A. Bayli”. The state of preservation is somewhat good, except for visible fungal foxing e...

Julius Cesar is an original etching artwork on the cardboard, realized by an Anonymous artist in 1700 ca. In very good conditions. The artwork represents the portrait of Julius Ces...