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4to. Cloth-backed boards. Some embrowning of endpapers. Edition limited to 300 numbered copies; printed at the Chiswick Press. Winnifred Matthews was born in 1874 in New Malden, on the outskirts of south-west London; her father was a warehouseman. She went from Wimbledon High School to Westminster School of Art, but died in 1895, aged only 20, while still at the Slade. Her drawings, so generously presented here, remain surprisingly affecting. "Denied many of the distracting 'advantages' open to the children of wealthy parents," writes Edward Garnett, "she took nothing at second-hand, but lived intensely in seizing, half consciously as a child does, the character of the people round her, catching with her amused girlish eye the human nature of the mixed crowds of people in this great, gray, grimy London of dull streets, and the comedy of life in its daily panorama . . . A little private exhibition of Winnifred Matthews' drawings, held at the Slade School after her death by Professor Frederick Brown, gave the writer indeed a special shock, a special sensation of being admitted, there and then, into a peculiar revelation of London . . . the incredible funniness of London street life, the whimsicality of its fashions . . . a vision of the joie-de-vivre of the London streets, alive with the ogling eyes of military men and the flying legs of curates, a fantastic rout of people dodging amid strings of gaudy 'buses, while processions of nightmarish sandwichmen wended their melancholy way under the flourish and glare of a London sunset.". Seller Inventory # T100234
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