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Richly illustrated, with 22 of the 39 sketches fully realised and only four of the 50 leaves left blank, the work demonstrates an artist ex- perimenting with a variety of media to depict scenes from her life, including high society parties, farming activities on the estate, and a seven-leaf series entitled “A Young Lady’s Day in the Country”: start- ing at 6am with brushing her hair; followed by watering the garden (7am–8am); breakfast (8.30am); studies (9am–10am); horse riding (10am–12 noon); visiting with a friend and child (12 noon–1pm); and finishing with reading to the sick (1pm–2pm). Three sketches of ships suggest the use of books designed to teach fine art. Many of the pencil sketches are partially incomplete and depict people in costume dress: these appear to have been drawn from tinsel prints, which were created from etched portraits of theatrical stars in roles they played on the London stage and were popular from the early 1800s onwards. Many of the captions are in French, demonstrating the artist’s learning as an accomplished young society woman. The only recorded location in the sketchbook is Thames Ditton House, in a sketch dated 1829. Now demolished, it stood opposite Boyle House, Cecilia’s mother’s familial home, where Cecilia grew up. Thames Ditton House was also owned by a succession of Fran- co-Irish aristocracy; it is known to have been in the hands of the Fitzwilliam Hume-Dick family from 1868. £2,250 [117960] 69 FRANK, Anne. Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942–1 Augusten 1944. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij, Contact, 1947 Octavo. Original speckled grey boards, titles to front board reversed out of a brown ground and to spine in brown. Portrait frontispiece, two photograph- ic plates, a plan and two facsimiles of Frank’s handwriting. A little rubbed, joints started at ends, front free endpaper verso separating from text block at head, text toned as usual, a good copy. true first edition of one of the genuinely emblematic books of the 20th century. Anne Frank’s dispassionate recording of life in the concealed attic room of her family’s Amsterdam home dur- ing the Nazi occupation has led to her achieving a rather narrowly
“iconic” status, a figurehead for the experience of Europe’s Jews. For Ilya Ehrenburg Frank represented “one voice [that] speaks for six million”, but her achievement is both wider and far more pro- found than this, as Roger Rosenblatt wrote in his piece on her for Time Magazine’s Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century : “The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world—the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, in- sisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings . . . The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition” ( Time , 14 June 1999). £6,000 [117002]
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All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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