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The Cave of Spleen (Illustration to Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock")
The Cave of Spleen (Illustration to Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock")

The Cave of Spleen (Illustration to Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock")

Aubrey Beardsley (English, 1872–1898)
1896
Medium/TechniquePen and black ink
DimensionsSheet: 25.5 x 17.3 cm (10 1/16 x 6 13/16 in.)
Credit LineWilliam Sturgis Bigelow Collection
Accession number27.61
On View
Not on view
ClassificationsDrawings
InscriptionsVerso in ink: Leonard Smithers Eq/ Effingham House/ Arundel Street/ Strand/ London Verso in graphite: reduce to same size/as the othersProvenance1896, sent by the artist to his publisher, Leonard Smithers (b. 1861 – d. 1907), London [see note]. William Sturgis Bigelow (b. 1850 – d. 1926), Boston; 1927, bequest of William Sturgis Bigelow to the MFA. (Accession Date: January 6, 1927)

NOTE: See Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London, 2016), vol. 2, pp. 222-224, cat. no. 983; and, for further on the possible twentieth-century provenance of the Rape of the Lock drawings, p. 209.