SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES. Autograph letter signed ("A C Swinburne") TO OSCAR WILDE ("My dear Sir"), The Pines, Putney Hill, 23 July 1881. One page, 8vo, integral blank leaf, slight wear at extreme lower edge. "YOUR EXQUISITELY PRETTY BOOK" Thanking Wilde for sending him a copy of his recently published Poems : "I am much obliged by the present of your exquisitely pretty book. My time for the present is much taken up with studies of another sort which claim, as long as they last, a somewhat exclusive devotion: but not so much as to prevent my enjoying such an 'impression' (to take the first instance which occurs to me) as that at p. 145 [referring to the poem 'Les Silhouettes']..." Wilde had sent copies of his first major book to various important writers of the day: Swinburne, Arnold, Browning, etc. As Richard Ellmann notes, referring to this letter ( Oscar Wilde , New York, 1988, p. 144): "Swinburne, without having read it all, was favorably impressed, he said, by such a poem as 'Les Silhouettes.' No such sympathy was forthcoming from the [various] reviewers... Punch said it was 'Swinburne and water.'" Provenance : John B. Stetson, Jr. (sale, Anderson Galleries, 23 April 1920, lot 460); Marjorie Wiggin Prescott (sale, Christie's New York, 6 February 1981, lot 437).
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES. Autograph letter signed ("A C Swinburne") TO OSCAR WILDE ("My dear Sir"), The Pines, Putney Hill, 23 July 1881. One page, 8vo, integral blank leaf, slight wear at extreme lower edge. "YOUR EXQUISITELY PRETTY BOOK" Thanking Wilde for sending him a copy of his recently published Poems : "I am much obliged by the present of your exquisitely pretty book. My time for the present is much taken up with studies of another sort which claim, as long as they last, a somewhat exclusive devotion: but not so much as to prevent my enjoying such an 'impression' (to take the first instance which occurs to me) as that at p. 145 [referring to the poem 'Les Silhouettes']..." Wilde had sent copies of his first major book to various important writers of the day: Swinburne, Arnold, Browning, etc. As Richard Ellmann notes, referring to this letter ( Oscar Wilde , New York, 1988, p. 144): "Swinburne, without having read it all, was favorably impressed, he said, by such a poem as 'Les Silhouettes.' No such sympathy was forthcoming from the [various] reviewers... Punch said it was 'Swinburne and water.'" Provenance : John B. Stetson, Jr. (sale, Anderson Galleries, 23 April 1920, lot 460); Marjorie Wiggin Prescott (sale, Christie's New York, 6 February 1981, lot 437).
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
