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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")

(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 others
Provenance1896, 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.