ihavenohonor:

Wedding of Psyche

Wood Engraved Images of Cupid and Psyche,
by Edward Burne-Jones

These images were created by Burne-Jones in the mid 1860’s for a projected edition of The Earthly Paradise, to be produced by Morris. Burne-Jones produced seventy drawings for Cupid and Psyche, and of these, forty-five were transferred to blocks and cut. The majority of the blocks were cut by Morris himself after he observed the process for the first few blocks. In 1866, Morris had set at the Chiswick Press a few trial sheets of the text together with the wood engravings placed at the top as a frieze. Morris was unhappy with the typography and the idea of an illustrated edition was abandoned. The Earthly Paradise was published in 1868 with a single Burne-Jones image on the title page. The Earthly Paradise and Love is Enough were the first attempts by Morris and Burne-Jones to realize grand illustrated editions of Morris’s poetry with Burne-Jones’s illustrations in the manner of the folio printings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Both works were abandoned primarily due to the lack of a suitable type face for the text. Their visions were not to come to fruition until twenty-five years later with the founding of the Kelmscott Press. These impressions are in many ways the true precursors of the wonderful books produced at the Kelmscott Press. Shortly after the block for the Psyche and the Opened Casket image was lost or destroyed, and Sydney Cockerell in 1956 stated that he owned the only copy of the image. In 1881, Morris printed the set of 44 blocks on Michallet paper by rubbing. It is not known how many copies were printed, but the number must surely have been very small. Only two copies have been definitively identified, one at the Clark Library in Los Angeles and one at the Birmingham Art Gallery in the U. K. A. R. Dufty, in his essay in the Clover Hill edition, refers to a copy belonging to Lord Kennett which is inscribed by Morris in 1881. This copy may be in the Fitzwilliam Museum in the U. K. Two additional printings of the suite were done in the nineteenth century. The set printed by George Campfield, foreman of painters at the Morris and Co., in 1887 and a set printed by Emery Walker in the early 1890’s on Kelmscott paper. Of the later, Sydney Cockerell indicated that eight copies were printed. Thus, all of the nineteenth century editions are rare. This is the only copy of the Campfield printing that can be attributed. We know that Campfield printed a small number of copies, but no copies have ever surfaced. In addition, all of the nineteenth century printings were accompanied by the additional suite of the borders and initials that Morris and Burne-Jones created for Love Is Enough.