Henry Weston Keen 1899-1935

The youngest of a family of six children, and the son of a tailor and merchant who ran a clothing manufactory, Henry Weston Keen did not truly begin his activity as an engraver and illustrator until after his return from the trenches of the Great War, following his mobilization in 1917 at the age of eighteen on the French front. Exhibiting his lithographs at the Senefelder Club in London, he developed a highly original surrealist universe with sometimes unsettling symbolism, partly inspired by the stylized and sinuous imagery of Aubrey Beardsley. He attracted the interest of one of Beardsley’s former publishers, John Lane, who entrusted him with the illustration of luxury books in limited editions intended for bibliophiles. Henry Weston Keen thus abundantly illustrated four major works, sometimes introduced by a leading contemporary author: The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales by Richard Garnett in 1924, with a preface by Thomas Edward Lawrence; The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde the following year, with an introduction by Osbert Burdett; Zadig and Other Tales by Voltaire in 1926, translated from the French by Woolf and Wilfred Scarborough Jackson; and finally The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, bringing together two celebrated plays by John Webster, in 1930. Suffering from tuberculosis, Keen died prematurely at the age of thirty-five in June 1935 in Walberswick, Suffolk, where he had withdrawn to undergo treatment. In October of the same year, London’s Twenty-One Gallery paid tribute to him by organizing a posthumous exhibition of his drawings and lithographs, publishing on that occasion a catalogue prefaced by Edward Garnett.

Combining pencil and India ink on paper, our meticulous drawing clearly illustrates the sometimes complex and strange symbolism of Henry Weston Keen. The artist humorously depicts a bald dwarf endowed with a tail, squeezed into a Shakespearean lace costume, perched on high heels, bowing before an overturned skull, a black mask, and a white rose.

Through their respective sizes, these different elements emphasize the exaggeratedly tiny, or Lilliputian, scale of the dwarf occupying the right-hand side of the sheet. Through an abundant graphic language favoring black and white alone, Henry Weston Keen blends Japanese and Rococo influences to propose, in the manner of Beardsley, an art on the threshold of the grotesque and the decadent, appearing as a satire of the hypocrisy of British high society. While the precise iconography remains mysterious, our drawing was published in 1922 in the magazine The Golden Hind, founded by Austin Osman Spare and Clifford Bax, and issued quarterly between October 1922 and July 1924 (fig. 1). Though short-lived, the magazine forms part of a broader attempt to reconcile radical modernism with a certain tradition, sometimes taking refuge in a conservative nostalgia. Enjoying a measure of success, the journal benefited from the support of writers such as Naomi Mitchison, Aldous Huxley, George Sheringham, and Cecil French, as well as several well-known illustrators including John Austen, John Nash, Glyn Philpot, Robert Gibbings, Jack Yeats, and Alan Odle.