Beresford Egan

Hailed as one of the few truly original British exponents of art déco, Beresford Egan was an essential element of bohemian London for over fifty years. He enjoyed a brief but dazzling career as draughtsman of decadence in the late 1920s-early 1930s, bursting upon artistic London, aged twenty-three, with his brilliantly illustrated lampoon on the banning of Radclyffe Hall’s notorious novel The Well Of Loneliness (1928). Over the next six years he produced illustrations and book covers of unparalleled beauty and ferocity for works by Aleister Crowley, Pierre Louÿs and Charles Baudelaire. He also illustrated his own novels and the monographs of his first wife, the beautiful Catherine Bower Alcock.

This book celebrates the centenary of Egan’s birth, presenting seventy-nine black-and-white and twenty-five colour illustrations-the best of his published art work from 1928 to 1934 -along with many striking drawings, paintings and designs never seen before. These are augmented by Adrian Woodhouse’s exhilarating and revealing account of the man and his chief talent, his varied later careers as music-hall performer, film star, dramatist, theatre critic, legendary ‘Chelsea artist’ and lover of beautiful women. The text is adorned with further images from Egan’s long and eventful life, including his earliest work as a cartoonist, photographs of him in British films of the 1940s and his last published drawings before his death in London in 1984.