Capricious Winds
Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1927. First Edition. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. 12mo. Pp.xvii, [1], 91. With a biographical note by Janet A. Fairbank. An appreciation by Harriet Monroe. Bound in black half-cloth over blue paper-covered boards, gilt lettering stamped on front cover and spine. In the full color-illustrated dust jacket that shows just a hint of edge-wear. Price of $2.00 intact on front flap. Fine. Item #6398 As for her poetry, it was declared as "intelligent" by the New York Times; another contemporary reviewer cited her "fragile free verse." Birch was not only a financial supporter of Poetry, as the appreciation by Harriet Monroe suggests, but contributed poems to the journal, without acknowledging herself as poet; several in this volume were first published there. The dust jacket reproduces a cubistic still life, utilizing an art-deco metallic silver ink typical of 1927. Our effort to identify the Braque-esque artist from the Bartlett Collection was for naught. A scarce book, especially in dust jacket. Dust jacket is now housed in a removable, clear archival sleeve.
A philanthropist, composer and poet, today Helen Birch Bartlett is best known for having assembled, with her husband Frederic Clay Bartlett, a staggering collection of modern paintings, mostly French, including works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, André Lhôte, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat and others, including Picasso, from the pantheon of modernism. Of the latter, she owned "the Old Guitarist." When she died at age 43, Frederic donated the collection to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Price: $175.00