Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd (London)
Books and prints by William Blake from the collection formed by the late Frank Rinder, Esq. [other title:] The Rinder collection of William Blake (catalogue for an auction conducted by Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 30 November 1993)
London, Christie, Manson & Woods, 1993
(26 cm), 37 pp., illustrations (some in colour). 13 lots. Price list loosely inserted. Publisher’s printed wrappers. - The most important sale of Blake prints since Sotheby’s dispersal of the W.A. White-Frances White Emerson collection (19 May 1958). The thirteen lots had been acquired by Rinder early in the twentieth century and had passed after his death in 1937 to his daughter, Esther Ramsay Harvey (1901-1993). Four lots (1, 2, 4, 7) were purchased by John Windle, either for stock or for Robert N. Essick; “Jerusalem” (lot 3), the copy from which the Trianon press facsimile was made, the first complete copy of Jerusalem that Blake managed to sell, but the last to have remained in private hands, realised £617,500 (Felix Oyens, on behalf of an anonymous collector; now in Chicago): “The word is that a considerably higher private-treaty offer had been rejected prior to the sale” (from a saleroom report in The Book Collector, Spring 1994, p.109). “Rinder’s copy of There is no Natural Religion was not offered for sale, allegedly because it had been shown to be a forgery by Joseph Viscomi in his Blake and the Idea of the Book, just published by Princeton” (from a notice in Print Quarterly, volume 11, 1994, pp.61-62). ¶ Annotated copy, priced.