Y90s Networks Gallery

The first volume of The DIal, one of the earliest of the late-Victorian little magazines, was edited and self-published by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who aimed to emulate the Pre-Raphaelite Germ of 1850. Their magazine of art and literature appeared in August 1889, with a wood engraved paper cover designed by Ricketts and engraved by Shannon. Laurence Housman met Ricketts and Shannon in 1890, when he was trying to obtain a copy of the out-of-print issue from its co-editors at their home in The Vale, Chelsea. Ricketts was a critically important mentor in…

Pen-and-ink drawing by Laurence Housman. Published in The Yellow Book, volume 1, April 1894.

The black-and-white line drawing shows a naked man with flowers in his hair int he foreground at right, gesturing to a group of naked men grouped on the river bank behind him. Housman's pen-and-inl image was reproduced in The Pageant, vol. 1 (1896), edited by Charles Shannon and Gleeson White.

Laurence Housman published his self-illustrated fairy tale, "Blind Love," in volume 2 of The Pageant (1897), edited by Charles Shannon and Gleeson White. His detailed line drawing for the story, titled "The Invisible Princess," is part of the volume's artwork, but not published adjacent to or within the pages of "Blind Love," rendering their relationship opaque. 

Laurence Housman's controversial image, "The Barren Life," was published in The Yellow Book, vol. 10, July 1896.

Laurence Housman designed the front cover of The Venture (vol. 1) as an homage to first cover of The Dial, designed by Charles Ricketts and engraved by Charles Shannon in 1889. Housman co-edited volume 1 of The Venture with Somerset Maugham. He also contributeda his fanciful "Proverbial Romances" to the volume's literary pieces and his title page design for his new collection of fairy tales, The Blue Moon to its artwork.

The title page for The Blue Moon was designed by Laurence Housman and engraved by his sister Clemence Housman, who was one of the period's foremost facsimile wood engravers. It was the only reproductive wood engraving included in volume 1 of The Venture (1903), whose artworks, with this single exception, featured original wood engravings designed and cut by the same artist. 

William Rothenstein created this lithograph of Laurence Housman in 1898, when Housman was 33 years old. Three years later, in 1901,  Laurence and his sister Clemence moved into Rothenstein's former home in South Kensington, 1 Pembroke Cottage, which became their London address until they moved to Street, Somerset, in the 1920s.In 1909,  their shared home and garden studio became the headquarters for the Suffrage Atelier.