The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur “decorated, designed and illuminated by hand” by Valenti Angelo, was published by The Limited Editions Club in New York in 1935. It was an edition of 1500 numbered copies, each signed by the artist, and is Coumans #262 & Paas ##2977–8. It featured the Introduction to FitzGerald’s second version, but used 101 quatrains “carefully selected from his five differing versions”. In what follows quatrain numbers will be those in the book, with a short quote from the relevant quatrain to help readers to relate them to FitzGerald’s originals. I give seven of the ten illustrations here, together with their facing text and surrounding decoration.
Fig.1a faces quatrain 1 (“Wake!”) to which it clearly relates, with the sun, moon and stars above, the raised arms of the central figure signifying “Wake!”, and the out–of–scale tower on which he stands being “The Sultan’s Turret” but without the shaft of light. Is the grazing animal in the panel below part of the illustration, or just decoration ?
Fig.1b faces quatrains 6 (“And David’s lips”) & 7 (“Come, fill the Cup”), though it doesn’t unequivocally relate to either, unless the figure is David piping “Wine!”, with a Nightingale on his right hand & the Bird of Time “on the Wing” in the background. But then the rivulet with fishes could relate to the “Garden by the Water” in the previous quatrain 5, and in any case, the Nightingale and the Rose are clearly depicted in the illustration facing quatrains 16 (“The Worldly Hope”) & 17 (“Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai”), neither of which quatrains relates to it (Fig.1c.)
Fig.1d faces quatrains 26 (“Why, all the Saints and Sages”) & 27 (“Myself when young”), and could perhaps relate to the Saints and Sages of quatrain 26 and the “great argument” of quatrain 27. But equally it could relate to the Potter’s Shop much further on in the text – quatrains 37 (“To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay”) & 82 (“Once more within the Potter’s house alone”), though in the former the Potter is “thumping his wet Clay” and in the latter Omar is alone in the Potter’s shop, so the illustration doesn’t exactly fit either. Are the pots in the panel below relevant, and if they are, what about the bird and tower in the panel above ? Or are both panels merely decorative, like the figures to be found in the highly coloured surrounds of both illustrations and text ?
Fig.1e faces quatrains 44 (“Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside”) & 45 (“Tis but a Tent”) but doesn’t relate to either, instead seemingly depicting the Book of Verse, the Jug of Wine and Loaf of Bread of quatrain 12, though without Omar and his singing Beloved!
Fig.1f faces quatrains 82 (“As under cover of departing Day”) & 83 (“Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes”), the start of the Potter’s Shop episode, but clearly relates to neither quatrain. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to relate to any quatrain at all, and the only sense I can make of it is Earth (flowering plant), Water (fishes), Fire (the Sun) and Air (birds) – the Four Elements of Omar’s day. Make of that what you will. Again, what of the panels above and below the main illustration ? The upper one could be Omar contemplating the Heavens, but what of the animal and plants in the lower one ? Man and Nature ? Or is that to read too much into what is merely decoration ?
Fig.1g faces quatrains 100 (“Yon rising moon that looks for us again”) & 101 (“And when like her, Oh Saki, you shall pass”) and seems to depict “this same Garden” of quatrain 100, though without the down–turned empty Glass of quatrain 101.
Clearly, then, though Angelo’s illustrations do have some references to FitzGerald’s verses, they are generally rather loosely related to the text, seemingly in large part decorative rather than interpretative, and with a somewhat blurred borderline between the two. But whatever, viewed as a whole they are certainly visually striking.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
We know from The Monthly Letter of the Limited Editions Club (March 1936) that the publishers printed the illustrations in four different colours and then sent them to Angelo at his home to be illuminated by hand with gold or silver, a task which took him fifteen months. We also know that when Angelo first suggested that The Limited Editions Club should publish an edition of The Rubaiyat, the idea was rejected by George Macy, the Club’s founder, on the grounds that there were too many Rubaiyats on the market already. But when Angelo submitted a dummy draft of his ideas for the illustration, illumination and typography of the book, Macy changed his mind, and publication went ahead (1a, p.14.)
In 1937, also for The Limited Editions Club, Angelo designed, decorated and illuminated The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el Yezdi by Richard Burton. This was almost certainly Burton’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (2), but though it sold well, largely on the strength of Burton’s reputation as an explorer and translator of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Burton’s Kasidah lacks the brilliance of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, and never rivalled it to any degree. Even so, it appears that Angelo had a liking for it alongside The Rubaiyat (1a, p.91.) As with his illustrations for The Rubaiyat, the illustrations for The Kasidah seem to relate only loosely to the text, on the facing page or otherwise, two examples (out of seven) being shown here as Fig.2a (Part 4 – “the tinkling of the Camel’s bell” features in verse 33) and Fig.2b (Part 6 – the golden halo suggests this might relate to the phrase “‘Tis blessed to believe,” in verse 8, a claim of which the author himself is sceptical.)
Somewhat later, in 1945, and again for The Limited Editions Club, Angelo gave a similar treatment to William Beckford’s Vathek: an Arabian Tale. I give two examples (out of nine) here, Fig.3a (p.23 – the Jinn Giaour appearing to the caliph Vathek from the Subterranean Fire) and Fig.3b (p.59 – a young woman bathing her “delicate feet and ivory limbs” in a bath of rose–water.)
The origins of Angelo’s fascination with the illumination of his illustrations and the typography of the text in which they appear, which led to the style of the foregoing illustrations, are to be found in his youth, of which more shortly. Meanwhile, before we leave the Limited Editions Club, and having mentioned Richard Burton already, we should mention their edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, published by them in six volumes in 1934, the year before The Rubaiyat. It is said that Angelo was commissioned to do 1001 illustrations for it (1a, p.92), though I must confess I have never actually counted them. The fact that this is an unexpurgated edition of Burton’s classic means that there are plenty of opportunities for Angelo to depict topless and naked women. I give six examples of his illustrations here. this being obviously only a small cross–section, concentrating on what one expects from what most of us know as “The Arabian Nights.” Fig.4a (p.42) depicts a man sprinkling magic water over his unfaithful wife to turn her into a she-mule; Fig.4b (p.110) shows a bit of an orgy in a garden; Fig.4c, (p.714) is a typical battle scene; Fig.4d (p.1507) depicts the obligatory dancing slave girls; Fig.4e (p.1865) is a blacksmith with the miraculous power to handle fire; and Fig.4f (p.2272) is a pair of genies. As can be seen, they are line drawings in the style of The Rubaiyat, The Kasidah and Vathek, but without colour or illumination, and more crudely drawn, almost like cartoons – indeed, some seem to have been done in a bit of a rush, perhaps not surprisingly in view of their number! Nevertheless, the book gained an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and was apparently a favourite of Angelo himself. Incidentally, the six volumes were reprinted and bound as three volumes by The Heritage Press, New York, in 1962, and the above quoted page numbers refer to this edition. (The Heritage Press was an off–shoot of The Limited Editions Club, offering cheaper reprints of the Club’s publications. It was sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s Limited Editions Club.”)
Curiously (to my way of thinking, at any rate), it is odd that The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night got an AIGA award, as did The Kasidah, but The Rubaiyat and Vathek didn’t. Perhaps the competition was stiffer in those years, or the planets were unfavourably configured.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
He was born in the village of Massarosa, Tuscany, on 23 June 1897. As he tells us in the quirky introduction to his Autobiographical Story (1b, p.21), his birth was attended by the bell of the village church falling from its support in the church tower, and by the burning down of the local mayor’s house. His early education was a rudimentary one – he was taught in a local monastery, alongside the other village children, by an old bald headed monk with a ragged beard:
One morning as I walked across the monastery courtyard, I saw my old teacher sitting on a bench in the morning sun reading a book. I had seen him thus many times before, but on this particular morning there seemed something different about him. As he turned a page of his book, lo and behold, his face seemed brighter than usual and occasionally tiny flashes of light seemed to sparkle all around him. I was entranced by the thought that my teacher must be possessed of some godlike powers. Surely, this was something to investigate. When I reached him, I found that he was reading a book the like of which I had never seen before, a fifteenth century manuscript Book of Hours, entirely written and decorated by hand. As he turned the pages, each one was embellished with pictures in vivid colours and burnished gold. The sparkles which I had seen as I crossed the courtyard were the sun’s reflections on the pages of the manuscript. This was a book that I think helped to influence the course of events during my later years. (1b, p.22)
It was in Italy, too, that on visits with his grandfather to churches in places like Florence, Padua, Ravenna and Assisi (1b, p.23), that he was introduced to and inspired by the works of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Gozolli. The gold used on altarpieces by Pietro Lorenzetti particularly impressed him (1a, p.3), this again being reflected in his fascination with illumination.
In 1905 the family emigrated to America, to join Angelo’s father, who had gone there the year before. They stayed briefly in New York before moving to Antioch, California, where they were living, in a farming community, at the time of the 1910 US Federal Census. This gives us a good overview of our artist’s family at that time. His father Augustine, who worked in a paper mill, was aged 38; his mother Derinda was aged 35; and Valenti himself was (incorrectly) recorded as aged 11 (he was actually 12 going on 13 at the time of the census.) He had four younger brothers, Sylvano (aged 9), Vincent (aged 7), Beppino (aged 4), John (aged 3) and a younger sister Jessie (aged 8), though these ages, and indeed their names, are subject to some uncertainty – Jessie, for example, was strictly Gesualda and Beppino or Beppi a familiar name for Joseph (Giuseppe) Michael! The family photograph shown in Fig,5a was presumably taken at about this time, as it does not feature another daughter, Rosie, born about five months after the 1910 census. On the front row are Beppino on the left and Sylvano on the right; in the middle row are Jessie, on the left, their mother, then John, and Vincent on the far right; and on the back row we have their father and Valenti.
As the oldest son in a large family, Angelo’s schooling was cut short by financial necessity, and he was set to work in the fields. However, his interest in art and passion for drawing stayed with him to such an extent that at the age of seventeen he moved to San Francisco to try to earn a living as an artist. At first he was forced to earn his living as a janitor, but then he got a job at the San Francisco Commercial Art and Engraving Company, a notable starting point for his future career (1a, p.4). In the meantime, in 1923, he had married Maxine Grimm, whom he had met whilst they were both attending evening classes at the California School of Fine Arts. The two of them exhibited together at the City of Paris Gallery in San Francisco in February 1924 (3a). In October 1925, at the Gump Gallery in San Francisco, Angelo got his first solo exhibition of some rather quirky pen and ink sketches / fantasies in colour and an oil painting of “One of the Stages of the Cross” (3b). Unfortunately, no good images of the sketches are available, but since I have seen no other reference to them anywhere, I give here – as better than nothing – the illustrations of some 18th century theatrical characters in a modern setting, as reproduced in the first newspaper article cited, with the added bonus of a contemporary photo of the artist himself (Fig.6). At this stage, though, exhibitions or not, financial necessity kept him working at the Company.
After three years there, though, despite having learned a lot, the work was becoming monotonous, but by good luck, in the spring of 1926, he was introduced to the Grabhorn brothers, Edwin and Robert, whose Grabhorn Press was devoted to producing beautifully printed limited editions after the fashion of the Kelmscott Press of William Morris. It was a good fit, as the brothers’ ideals of book production, with hand–set type and harmonious illustrations, echoed that Book of Hours which had so impressed him as a boy.
Though not the first book Angelo did for them, an interesting example is the edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, published in a limited edition of 195 copies in 1927, for which he did the frontispiece and marginal decorations. The frontispiece is shown here as Fig.7a and the facing title page & opening page of text in Fig.7b. It was advertised at $15 a copy – a tidy sum back then.
Perhaps the most famous book which Angelo illustrated for the Grabhorn brothers was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, printed by them for Random House Inc., New York in 1930, in a limited edition of 400 copies. It was an impressive and hefty folio size volume of 423 pages, containing 37 woodcuts, and it was ranked among the Fifty Books of the Year by the AIGA. It was sold at $100 a copy, and though times were hard for most, the book had an oversubscription before publication of more than 200 copies (3c), showing that then as now there was still plenty of money about, at least in some places. But despite all the hype, I remain unimpressed by Angelo’s simple woodcuts, which led even one of his fans to describe them as “curiously inanimate,” adding, “They contribute graphic balance to the pages, but no warmth, no feeling, no song" (1a, p.55.) Two examples of the illustrations are given here, with a sample of text, as Figs.8a & 8b. Part of the problem was perhaps some prolonged dithering over harmonising the type used and the various draft illustrations (1a, p.52–5) – as Angelo put it in his Autobiographical Story, the book “took on a different form each week...and went through about nine months of growing pains before a final decision was reached.” He went on:
Experimenting for the most suitable form of illustrations for a book is a slow, painstaking process, if the work is to be more than the commonplace run–of–the–mill stuff. Type and decoration must be in harmony.
To this day, I am plagued by this method of working. It is a costly method, but in the final analysis worth it." (1b, p.31)
In the case of Leaves of Grass, though, that is perhaps debatable! Incidentally, a photo–reduced copy of Leaves of Grass was published by the Modern Library, New York, as no.50 in its Giant Series of the Classics. Though undated, newspaper advertisements show it to have been published in January 1940 (3d).
I am rather more impressed by the delightful illustrations Angelo did for A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode and his Meiny, printed at the Grabhorn Press for the Westgate Press, in an edition of 280 copies, published in 1932. Two examples are given here as Figs.9a & 9b.
In February 1932 thirty five of Angelo’s original woodcuts for Leaves of Grass were exhibited at the Art Center in San Francisco (3e) and later in that same year an exhibition of 14 of his paintings and 12 drawings was held at the Vickery Atkins and Torrey Gallery in San Francisco (1a, p.126), of which more later. In April 1933 an exhibition of some red chalk drawings was held at the Gelber–Lilienthal Gallery in San Francisco (3f) and in October that same year an exhibition of some of his paintings was held at the Gump Gallery in San Francisco (3g). One of the chalk drawings is shown here as Fig.10a and one of the paintings (“The Artist and his Family”) in Fig.10b, these being taken from the newspapers cited, since I have seen no record of them anywhere else, and their style is rather interesting.
But to return to Angelo’s life story, in 1933, having illustrated 45 books for them, he left the Grabhorn brothers, whose sales were not doing well, and with his wife and their four years old daughter, Valdine, moved to New York, where, as we saw earlier, he was soon working for the Limited Editions Club and its associated Heritage Press. In 1934, their son Peter was born. In the 1940 US Federal Census, he is 42, his occupation listed as “Author, Artist – Private Business” (= freelance); his wife Maxine is 41, no occupation listed, perhaps not surprisingly with two children; Valdine is now 11 and Peter, 5.
For those puzzled by “author”, it should be pointed out that in 1938, the Viking Press of New York had published Nino, effectively a fictionalised account of his childhood in Italy, dedicated to his two children. Its two–page–spread title page is shown in Fig.11. The book, which gained an AIGA award, resulted from him having done the illustrations for Ruth Sawyer’s book for children, Roller Skates, published by the Viking Press in 1936, and which had also gained an AIGA award. May Massee, the editor, was so impressed by his illustrations, and intrigued by the story of his childhood, that she suggested that he do a book for children based on it (1a, p.6.) It was to be the first of over 30 books he wrote and / or illustrated for children, fifteen of them for Viking Press, including several sequels to Nino about his life on moving to America, all published between 1938 and 1966 (1a, p.102–5.) During that period, of course, he continued to illustrate other books for a range of publishers, notably, in addition to those already mentioned, the Peter Pauper Press, for whom he did some 20 books between 1936 and about 1957 (many of the PPP publications are undated.) In all, Angelo is said to have illustrated some 250 books, and clearly we can only cover a limited cross section here. We shall look at more of these presently, but meanwhile to continue with his biography.
In 1935, Angelo had founded the Golden Cross Press with a view to issuing limited editions of small books, but it seems only to have issued eight titles, the last, A Battle in Washington Square, appearing in 1942 (the battle being a snowball fight, watched by a young man and an old man, who see in it their own experiences of war.)
In 1949 he founded The Press of Valenti Angelo, virtually a one–man operation in which he designed, decorated / illustrated and printed limited editions of small books. One of his first publications was Hymns to Aphrodite, published in 1949. Fig.12a shows its title page cum opening text and Fig.12b its colophon (4). The Press’s last publication, N. Scott Momaday’s poem, Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion, was published in 1975.
In the early 1960s, Angelo had been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. After a tracheotomy, he recovered slowly, but his speech was limited thereafter, as was his artistic output. In February 1971, his wife Maxine died suddenly, leaving him alone in a large house. Winding up any remaining business in New York, he returned to San Francisco in September 1974, dying there on 3 September 1982. The photograph in Fig.5b, wearing his characteristic beret, was taken only a few years before his death. His remains and those of his wife are entombed in the mausoleum at the Ferncliff Cemetery in New York.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Going in roughly chronological order, an edition of Norman Douglas’s novel South Wind, with twelve illustrations by Angelo, was published by Dodd, Mead of New York in 1928. Two examples are given here as Fig.13a (the frontispiece) and Fig.13b (facing p.270) – note the curiously elongated form of Miss Wiberforce, repeated with the human figures in other illustrations. In 1929 the same publisher issued an edition of Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, again with twelve illustrations by Angelo. Fig.14a (facing p.66) and Fig.14b (facing p.128) are two examples which capture nicely the feel of the 18th century.
I must mention here two other books illustrated for the already–mentioned Heritage Press: that Biblical curiosity The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s, published in 1935 (its frontispiece and title page are shown in Fig.15) and Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, published in 1945 – not a reprint of the edition done for the Grabhorn brothers, mentioned above, but a completely new edition (its frontispiece and title page are shown in Fig.16.) It is immediately obvious that in style these belong with The Rubaiyat, The Kasidah and Vathek, covered earlier.
Backtracking slightly to 1935, in that year the Three Sirens Press of New York published Chinese Love Tales, “translated from the original of George Souile (sic) de Morant (5a)”, illustrated with 35 line drawings by Angelo. A Note in the front of the book reads:
Previously published as “Eastern Shame Girl (5b),” This book was attacked – and acquitted – in the courts, with judicial recognition of its exceptional literary merit (3h).
The original source of the stories appearing in this collection of Chinese love tales is the classic literature of China in the seventeenth century.
The book has rightly been compared to Boccaccio’s Decameron, and though it isn’t exactly a collection of innocent starry–eyed love stories, it can certainly be described as a bit risqué in places, though tame by today’s standards. I give four examples of the illustrations to this quirky little book here. Fig.17a (p.15) & Fig.17b (p.39) are both from the story “Eastern Shame Girl”, the central character of which is both a beautiful prostitute and an accomplished singer, with whom numerous men have fallen hopelessly in love, and who herself falls in love. Fig.17c (p.126) is from the story “The Monastery of the Esteemed Lotus”, to which monastery childless women go to pray for children, their prayers being answered, after they have been drugged with ‘magic pills’, by lascivious monks entering their supposedly sealed ‘prayer’ rooms via a secret entrance. Fig.17d (p.142) is from the story “A Complicated Marriage”. It shows a man dressing up as his sister, whom he resembles, so that he can pretend to marry her sick betrothed in her place. On the wedding night, he (as a she) ends up unintentionally in bed with her, and the inevitable happens, as she falls in love with him, and no longer wishes to marry her sick intended husband. Intrigues to avoid family scandals follow, but they do marry, and the jilted sick man marries the he–she’s sister. How ? Why ? As the title indicates, it is complicated. Very. The cartoon style of these line drawings rather reminds me of Angelo’s illustrations for Robyn Hode, and, of course, those for “The Arabian Nights”, mentioned above.
As already noted, by the late 1930s we find Angelo illustrating books for the Peter Pauper Press (PPP), over twenty of them in all, between about 1936 and the late 1950s (6).
In 1943 (though it is undated) they published an edition of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, translated by Thomas Okey, containing 12 illustrations in black and white. Fig.18a relates to St. Francis’s vision of St. Peter and St. Paul, and Fig.18b shows St. Francis taming the Wolf of Gubbio. They neatly capture the style of the medieval art relating to St. Francis. The same illustrations were used in the PPP’s later edition of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, this time translated by Abby Langdon Alger, published in and dated 1964.
In 1945 (again undated) the PPP published an edition of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, with 15 full page illustrations in black and white. Many of these seem to be placed in the book alongside text to which they do not relate, and it is not always clear to which part of the text they do relate. However, Fig.19a (on p.73) seems to relate to St. Augustine’s famous plea to the Lord, “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet” (on p.153) and Fig.19b (on p.107) seems to relate to St. Augustine’s rejection of astrology as contrary to free will (on p.123.) I find their stained–glass–window style rather appealing.
In 1950 (again undated) came an edition of Hamlet containing ten full page linocut illustrations, in yet another style. Fig.20a is the illustration for Act 2, Scene 1, and Fig.20b that for Act 3, Scene 3.
In 1957 (again undated), the PPP published an edition of Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven, the frontispiece of which is shown in Fig.21a (the Soul without God) and the tailpiece of which is shown in Fig.21b (the Soul finally rescued by God.)
In the following year, again undated, they published an edition of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, two typical illustrations being shown in Fig.22a (Christ bearing his Cross, facing p.62) and Fig.22b (Christ with children, facing p.158.)
Enough has been said now to show that Angelo was capable of a wide variety of styles.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
One of the reasons there aren’t more paintings by Angelo in existence today is that when he started a new painting, he very often painted over an older one, and as many as four or five paintings could be painted one on top of another (1a, p.20–1.) Many of his paintings must be unrecorded, and their whereabouts unknown, if indeed they still exist. A photograph of one, “Ferry Tower and Waterfront” was published in The San Francisco Chronicle on 8 July 1923 (p.5) and another, “Coaling the Ship”, in the same newspaper on 9 January 1927 (p.6). In an article headed, “Artist finds inspiration for paintings in Mines, Mills and Pastry Shop”, published in The San Francisco News on 23 November 1932 (p.5), one of his paintings was illustrated alongside a photograph of Angelo himself (Fig.23a). As can be seen, it is similar in style to Figs.10a & 10b. In fact, the painting in Fig.23a was one in an exhibition (mentioned earlier) of paintings on a theme of “Man at Work,” at the Vickery, Atkins and Torrey Gallery, a brief account of which was given in The San Francisco Chronicle on 27 November 1932 (p.31.) This article published a photograph of another painting in the exhibition, “The Gravel Pit”, headed “Industrial Scene in a Novel Style” (Fig.23b.) A later continuation of the man at work theme is to be found in the limited edition lithograph “The Factory” dating from c.1940 (Fig.24), and sometimes titled “The Strike” (1a, p.30.)
A lithograph of a rather different nature featured in The San Francisco Chronicle on 29 January 1933 (p.31) – “The Evil House” (Fig.25). The caption to the photograph of it dubs it as “one of the more conservative efforts included in the exhibition of progressive art being sponsored by Joseph A. Danysh at the City of Paris Galleries.” The house could certainly have served as model for the filming of Hitchcock’s classic film “Psycho”!
Angelo certainly did have his conservative side, painting various landscapes and still life paintings (1a, p.18–24), but rather more interesting is his preoccupation with horses. The painting in Fig.26a is one such, titled “Horses in the Night” or “Moonlight and Horses”, reckoned to date from c.1930–32. Another, titled “Rain”, of c.1933, is shown in Fig.26b, and there appear to have been others in a series of them (1a, p.21.) These are clearly not real horses, but dream–like ones – note the industrial scene to the lower left of the former and the faceless men in the latter. It has been suggested, in the article from which Fig.10b is taken, and which dates from October 1933 (3g), that Angelo might have picked up his interest in symbolic horses from the paintings of the surrealist de Chirico, but I have seen no confirmation of this. Certainly by the 1960s his paintings had become more abstract and impressionistic in style (1a, p.24), though I have seen no examples of these, and I gather that claims of his being influenced by the works of Kandinsky and Klee were rejected by Angelo himself.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Readers may well have noticed that Angelo illustrated quite a number of religious books. In addition to those already mentioned, we might add The Book of Job (Grabhorn Press,1926), The Sermon on the Mount (Peter Pauper Press, 1949), The Birthday of Little Jesus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1953) and The Book of Psalms (Limited Edition Club, 1960), this being just a selection. This is perhaps not surprising in view of his Catholic family background – in 1943 he was elected to the Webster Gallery of Living Catholic Authors for his children’s books (3i) and in 1959 he did over 400 line drawings for an edition of The Lives of the Saints for the Catholic Press of Chicago (one of at least seven books he did for them.) Though an artist can certainly illustrate books simply to earn a living, in Angelo’s case there seems to be more to it than that, for a sizeable proportion of the limited editions published by his own Press of Valenti Angelo were of a religious nature, notably The Most Holy Miracle of Saint Francis in taming the fierce Wolf of Gubbio (75 copies in 1949) and The Canticle of the Sun (100 copies in 1951.) St. Francis of Assisi was apparently Angelo’s favourite saint, for in 1943 he carved a sculpture of him for the Daniel family plot in the Glenwood Cemetery, Bristol, Tennessee (3j); he wrote and illustrated a children’s story, based on a statue of St Francis, in Angelino and the Barefoot Saint (Viking Press, 1961); and in 1976 he designed a St. Francis–based Christmas card (Fig.27) to be sold as a fund–raiser for the San Francisco Public Library (3k) – there were no Santas in any of the Christmas cards designed by Angelo (1a, p.82 & p.120.) Also worth noting at this point is that, in the run up to the Christmas of 1954, Angelo did 25 line drawings for a serialisation of the Christmas story, re–told in the words of Norman Vincent Peale, to be published in several different newspapers. Three instalments are shown here as Fig.28a, 28b & 28c – all in a very traditional format with a long artistic history, as might be expected. Finally, given his life in Italy as a child, it comes as no surprise to learn that in later life Angelo painted various Madonnas (1a, p.23 & p.124 – Fig.29, dating to 1960) and Madonna–like images (Fig.30), the latter apparently bearing the title “Visionary Woman with Veil”, dating to 1940.
Given all this, it is a little surprising, or maybe not given his cancer, that his obituary in The San Francisco Examiner on 5 September 1982 (p.33) finished thus, “No services were held, at his request. Donations are preferred to the American Cancer Society.” His daughter, however, clarifies this:
Both my mother and father were strongly against the practice of traditional funeral rituals. However, on several occasions my father suggested that after his death a farewell party, with good food, lots of wine, and the company of all his old friends would be an acceptable alternative. “Then,” he told me with a sly wink, “they can tell all those stories about me they wouldn’t dare to while I was around.” (1a, p.153)
The party duly took place, needless to say, and Omar would doubtless have approved.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Note 1a: Valenti Angelo – the Man and the Artist, edited by Earl and Gloria Emelson (Heron House, Concord, California, 2010), published in a limited edition of 250 copies. “A Biographical Sketch” by Earl Emelson (p.3–9) is particularly useful, as are Deborah Bruce’s essay “Notes on the Paintings of Valenti Angelo” (p.19–24), Megan L. Benton’s essay “Valenti Angelo and the Grabhorn Press” (p.49–55) and George Tweney’s essay “Valenti Angelo and the Limited Editions Club” (p.83–93.)
Note 1b: Valenti Angelo – Author, Illustrator, Printer, various contributors (The Book Club of California, San Francisco, 1976), published in a limited edition of 400 copies. The book contains Oscar Lewis’s essay, “Valenti Angelo: An Appreciation and an Explanation” (p.7–8); a brief biography by Annis Duff on p.17–18; “An Autobiographical Story” on p.21–34; and Anne Englund’s checklist of books illustrated on p.37–90.
A slightly different version of “An Autobiographical Story” is also to be found in booklet form, this containing, for example, the above–quoted accounts of the collapsing church bell and the fire at the mayor’s house, to which is added, in The Book Club version, the account of a large wooden crucifix, hung over his cradle, which fell down upon him on the day after his birth. The booklet version is undated, but was presumably a reprint of the 1970 version of “An Autobiographical Story” contained in the book Valenti Angelo – Author, Illustrator, Printer: a Checklist of his Work from 1926–1970 (Self–Published in a limited edition of 55 copies, Bronxville, New York, 1970) mentioned on p.8 of Oscar Lewis’s essay and listed on p.85 of Anne Englund’s checklist. The booklet version was also issued from Bronxville, New York (where Angelo lived until 1974) and was printed by the Meriden Gravure Co., Meriden, Connecticut, though it bears Angelo’s pressmark as shown in Fig.12c (on which see note 4 below.)
Note 2: According to Frank McLynn’s book Burton: Snow upon the Desert (1990), Burton’s aim in producing The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el Yezdi: a Lay of the Higher Law (1880) was to surpass the great success of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (p.320.) After Burton’s death, his wife, Isabel, went to great lengths to deny this (unsuccessful) rivalry, claiming that though published in 1880, Burton had actually written The Kasidah in 1853, on his return from Mecca, and thus before The Rubaiyat had even been published. As McLynn says, though, “careful analysis reveals it beyond doubt as a work written as Burton approached sixty” (p.321), by which time he had long been familiar with FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (he had certainly been given a copy in 1861, apparently by Whitley Stokes.) Indeed, a direct influence is unmistakeable in places, most notably in Part 2, verse 8 (“divorce old barren Reason from his bed”) and in Part 3, verse 6 (“Who knows not Whence he came nor Why”).
Note 3a: San Francisco Bulletin, 15 February 1924 (p.11.)
Note 3b: San Francisco Call Bulletin, 8 October 1925 (p.17 & continued on p.30) and San Francisco Bulletin, 10 October 1925 (p.13 & continued on p.14.)
Note 3c: Salt Lake Tribune, 23 November 1930 (p.49.)
Note 3d: The Pittsburgh Press, 28 January 1940 (p.22.)
Note 3e: San Francisco Examiner, 28 February 1932 (p.36.)
Note 3f: San Francisco Chronicle, 9 April 1933 (p.43.)
Note 3g: San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 1933 (p.75.)
Note 3h: eg Brooklyn Eagle, 2 July 1933 (p.50) and The Republican, 2 March 1934 (p.11.)
Note 3i: eg the Los Angeles newspaper The Tidings, 26 February 1943 (p.8) and the Wisconsin newspaper The La Crosse Tribune, 30 November 1943 (p.5.)
Note 3j: The Bristol Herald Courier, 16 October 1943 (p.5.)
Note 3k: The San Francisco Examiner, 19 December 1976 (p.78.)
Note 4: The Dolphin in Fig.12b has nothing to do with the goddess Aphrodite being born of the foam of the sea, but was adopted by Angelo from the Dolphin and Horn pressmark of the Grabhorn brothers. The Italian motto “Per Pane e Piacere” means literally “For Bread and Pleasure”, in this context presumably meaning, “Published both as Work (for a living) and for Pleasure.” The same motto is found in the pressmark at the back of the booklet version of “An Autobiographical Story” mentioned in note 1b above (Fig.12c), this pressmark being adapted from that of the Golden Cross Press, the motto replacing the initials GCP of the Press. Note that the female figure stands on the Dolphin and holds the Horn of the Grabhorn Brothers’ pressmark, and that the original GCP pressmark had the Cross appropriately illuminated in gold.
Note 5a: George Soulié de Morant (1878–1955) was fluent in Chinese and served as a French consul in China for many years. He wrote various books on Chinese History, Art & Literature, as well as promoting the use of acupuncture in the West. He translated several works of Chinese literature, the seven stories in Chinese Love Tales being taken from his Les Contes Galants de la Chine (Paris, 1921) and Trois Contes Chinois du XVIIe Siècle (Paris 1926).
Note 5b: Eastern Shame Girl was first privately published, in a limited edition of 1000 copies, in New York in 1930, with four striking, mildly erotic, black & white illustrations by Marcel Avond. “Eastern Shame Girl” was also the title of the opening story in the book, though this title is not one of Soulié de Morant’s own, and seems to have been chosen to spice things up a bit and generate sales: the original title was “L'Amour d’une Chanteuse” (in Trois Contes.) The translator of the French text into English was not named.
Note 6: Unfortunately many of the books published by the Press were undated, so any dates quoted here are as assigned to them in Sean Donnelly & J. B. Dobkin, The Peter Pauper Press of Peter and Edna Beilenson, 1928–1979: a Bibliography and History (2013).
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My thanks are due to Alison Vickery for the use of Fig.5a, which is taken from the Gallery of her very useful online family tree of Valenti Angelo, and to Heron House, the publishers of the excellent sourcebook cited in note 1a, for the use of Figs.26b & 29. Many of the books illustrated by Angelo are rare private press / limited editions, for access to several of which I must thank the staff at the British Library in London and the John Rylands Library here in Manchester. Finally, I must thank Joe Howard for his very useful observations on Angelo’s Rubaiyat illustrations and Sandra Mason for proof–reading the article.
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