Several catalogues of Charles Shannon's lithographs have been published. Between 1889 and 1898, fifty-four lithographs were issued. In 1902, Charles Ricketts compiled the first catalogue, announcing that Shannon had given up lithography.
But Shannon returned to the lithographic stone in 1904, printing another twenty-nine lithographs, abandoning the medium in 1909. In 1914 a second catalogue was published by Georges Derry (pseudonym of R.A. Walker) who described the lithographs that were made between 1904 and 1909.
Again, Shannon took up lithography in 1917, and produced another thirteen lithographs. In 1920 Derry (Walker) produced a new catalogue covering most of the latter batch, and finally, in 1978, Paul Delaney published the definitive catalogue of Shannon's lithographs.
Some of these have smaller edition sizes than others, and consequently have been less reproduced in publications, auction catalogues, or in online presentations of museum collections. One rarely seen print is 'The Garland' from 1918.
A copy is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and published on their website (find the print on Rijksmuseum.nl).
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Charles Shannon, 'The Garland' (lithograph, 1918) [Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: RP-P-1949-308] |
There was an edition of 25 impressions in sanguine, or in grey-black, or in brown, 35,6 x 20,4 cm, initialled CS in the stone. The Rijksmuseum copy is in grey-black.
This lithograph was not listed by Derry. However, an earlier unpublished version from 1906 was described as follows:
Two nude women are putting up a garland; one is standing on a stool and stretches up to hang the garland over the top of a door, and the other stands on the ground and supports her. A small child on the right is holding a wreath and watching the others.
A trial proof (one of only three copies) of the earlier version is in the collection of the British Museum. Twelve years passed between that first version and the second.
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| Charles Shannon, 'The Garland' (lithograph, trial proof, 1906) [Collection The British Museum, London: 1913,0814.54] [© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence] |
