George Bernard Shaw at the tailor

Details

Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)
George Bernard Shaw at the tailor
signed and dated 'Max/1914' (lower right) and inscribed 'Life-Force, Woman-Set-Free, Superman, etc./Georg Brandes ('chand d'Idées): 'What'll you take for the lot?'/George Bernard Shaw: 'Immortality.'/Georg Brandes: 'Come, I've handled these same goods before! Coat, Mr. Schopenhauer's; waistcoat, Mr Ibsen's; trousers Mr Nietzsche's'/George Bernard Shaw: 'Oh, but look at the patches!' (lower left)
pencil and watercolour
15½ x 12½ in. (39.3 x 31.8 cm.)

Literature

R. Hart-Davis, A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, London, 1972, p. 136, no. 1500.
N. John Hall, Max Beerbohm Caricatures, published Yale, 1997, pp. 92-93.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis. This lot is subject to storage and collection charges. **For Furniture and Decorative Objects, storage charges commence 7 days from sale. Please contact department for further details.**

Lot Essay

Beerbohm had conflicting views of George Bernard Shaw and his philosophies. 'His philosophy', said Beerbohm, 'rests like Plato's Republic, on a profound ignorance of human nature.' However the two men were friends, and their correspondence shows their amicable trading of insults. Beerbohm was equally contradictory about Shaw's plays:

'I never read anything of his without wishing that he had never been born and hoping that he will live to a ripe old age!'

In this present watercolour, Beerbohm adopts the persona of Georg(es) Brandes (1842-1927), the Danish critic and scholar, in order to illustrate the ambiguousness and naivety of Shaw's philosophy. As the seller of ideas, Brandes' adoption of Nietzschean 'aristocratic radicalism' and superman theory was the perfect foil to Beerbohm's idea of Shaw.

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