Spanish-Influenced Sketchbook & Friendship Album from 1890s Valencia

Collection of sketches and inscriptions, many of them from Anita Bartle’s late teens spent in the Spanish city of Valencia before she returned to England, completed her education in Bristol and started a newspaper column with the Daily Chronicle which led to the publication of This is My Birthday in 1902 by Grant Richards, and several other books.

Scenes from Bartles’ Valencia years dominate the early part of the sketch book through 1894 and 1895, including an extract from the ‘Danza Espanola’ by Jose Salvador, inscriptions by Rosario Martinez, and a silhouette of ‘El Judio Errante 94’ - The Wandering Jew.

Back in England Bartle secured a beautifully rendered gouache of Dick Whittington; an amusing sketch contrasting ‘An Ideal Artist’ with ‘The Real’ (idyllic Bohemia versus domestic squalor) by F P Stonetake with further sketches by Jessie Walters, Hilda Dix (1875-1946, painter and illustraor for Raphael Tuck and Hildesheimer), Alice Treasure, Amelia Sabadie and a finely executed head of a young woman by ‘C Soler’. The sketchbook terminates with a final decorative vignette on the lower pastedown.

Anita Barle, later Brackenbury (1876-1962) became a close friend of Alice Meynell through whom she entered the circle of Augustus John and William Orpen who painted her several times - the Tate holds their correspondence. She married Aloysius Brackenbury in 1906.

DESCRIPTION: Buckram bound sketchbook (26x19cm) with retaining strap, detached at one end; fraying to buckram but binding sound. Stationer’s ticket of George Rowney to front pastedown; above this a decorative inscription and decoration by ‘Anita Bartle’.