Taste and Temperament: A Brief Study of Psychological Types in their Relation to the Visual Arts

Joan Evans

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1939

About this Item

First Edition ( 'First Published 1939' ). The book is in excellent condition. You can see the covers in the photos. They are exceptionally clean. The gilt lettering on the spine is nicely bright. There's just a thin bit of crinkling at the spine ends. The cover edges are in very good shape, one very slight dent on each of the two bottom ones. The corners are also in very good shape, with just speck-sized spots of rubbing. The top page edge is a light green. It looks very good. The middle page edge is very clean. The bottom page edge is deckled or rough-cut. They did a very good job, the edges are actually smooth. As is often the case with deckled edges the length of the pages varies. The book is square and the spine is straight. The binding is solid from cover to cover. The covers are nicely, tightly bound. The pages are in very nice condition. They are very clean. Scrolling through, I saw no more than two or three insignificant spots. I didn't find any conspicuous creasing. There are no placeholder creases, no dog-eared corners. Two consecutive pages have a small nick at their bottom edge, no tears. The book ends with a fairly long section of 48 plates. These pages are in excellent condition, exceptionally clean (one page has a thin line above its bottom corner, not reaching the plate). There is no foxing on any of these pages. There are no markings in the book. There is only one attachment, a very tiny bookseller label (Blackwell's, Oxford, England) just above the bottom edge of the front inside cover. There is no writing to be found anywhere in the book. You can see the dust jacket in the first few photos. It has some toning. The spine is sun tanned. There is a loss at the top and bottom edges of the spine, neither touching the print. There is a tiny loss off the top edge of the front. There also a few thin losses at the jacket's middle edges. There are a few dark spots on the rear cover. The flaps are in very good shape. All four have small, neat clips at their corners, but the price is present and unaffected. I have always had the jacket in a fitted protective cover. From the dust jacket: 'If aesthetics be the study of the relation that exists between the man who perceives beauty and the object that he finds beautiful, it must include a study of those tendencies in feeling and that bent in thought which we call temperament. This book examines the history of the classification of human temperaments, and arrives at a fourfold classification as extrovert or introvert, quick or slow. The author describes men of each temperament in their relation to visual art, whether the everyday part of house decoration, fine art produced by others, or fine art created by themselves. The author thus attempts to discover the psychological reasons that actuate taste, and the particular type of beauty which each type of man admires. Her investigation does much to classify and explain the many definitions of beauty that have been enunciated and the many kinds of beauty that have been produced. She even finds a type of composition characteristic of each psychological type, and illustrates examples of these from well-known works of art. Not all of Dr. Joan Evan's readers will agree with her conclusion; but anyone interested in art or psychology will find her arguments interesting and provocative. They bring a new element into art-criticism as well as into the material of aesthetic philosophy.'. Seller Inventory # 005014

Bibliographic Details

Title: Taste and Temperament: A Brief Study of ...

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London

Publication Date: 1939

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Good

Edition: 1st Edition