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rebel_soldier Store
EXTREMELY RARE!!!
ONLY 1 AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE!!!
GET IT WHILE YOU CAN!!!
THE
WELSH MAID
This auction is for an original 1942 1ST EDITION! of “THE WELSH MAID” by Roye, the flamboyant British photographer who clothed his naked ladies in art. If you are an aficionado of the female form, YOU’LL LOVE THIS BOOK!!!
It contains 48 PHOTOENGRAVED PLATES!!! of genteel nudes photographed in a pictorialist style that deliver the bare necessities, but with originality. Its subjects are the women of Wales. These beautiful Welsh Maids have power and beauty enough to charm you and to hold you, that quality which made the old Welsh poet complain that, even in church, his eyes were for the women, and only the nape of his neck to heaven.
It provides three distinct types of female beauty to be found in Welsh women, each a pattern laid by different racial ancestors, many hundreds —and possibly thousands— of years ago.
First of all the short and dark “Mediterranean” type, red-cheeked and round-headed, with mischievous eyes dark as a mountain tarn. Quick and eager, highly vivacious, tempestuous almost.
The second type is most frequently found in the hilly parts of North Wales. Dark, but tall and graceful, long-limbed and slender. Her skin is white, and only slightly tinted in the cheeks, her eyes blue-gray, or sometimes black, in an oval face. Reserved in manner, there is something elusive and perennially attractive about her, something suggestive of the mists of her mountains, and her beauty is enhanced by that sudden look of remoteness which passes over her face.
The third type is fair; warmer than fair, for the glint of red in her hair lights up her beauty and makes gold of her colouring, deepening the luster of her blue eyes. Fine-tinted in complexion, vivid and vital in all her moods and movements.
Published in 1942, this book is in GOOD+ CONDITION! for its age and especially to be 68 YEARS OLD!!! ALL PAGES ARE PRESENT!!! and tightly bound with NO TEARS!!! or markings. Its most notable minor flaws are: the front cover is partially faded and some of the cloth at the fore edge of the covers is rubbed exposing the boards. The inside plates are in FINE condition!
This is an EXTREMELY RARE!!! book that a search of all the major internet book sites reveals this to be THE ONLY ONE AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE!!! at the time of this listing so…GET IT WHILE YOU CAN!!!
THE PHOTOGRAPHER:
Horace ROYE (1906 – 2002), famous for his nudes and pictures of starlets, was one of the 20th century’s great pioneering photographers whose familiarity with cinema and stage stars during the war years led to international fame and some notoriety. As a noted photographer of nudes who claimed to have seen more than 10,000 naked women through the lens, he successfully contested the prudish obscenity laws of his day, paving the way for others to publish work that Roye himself considered to be pornographic.
Like many photographers in the 1930’s who went on to become highly successful and wealthy, Horace Roye had no professional training. His business was based in Chelsea and benefited both from its location and from the seemingly insatiable demand for celebrity studio portraits. Roye worked hard on his social connections and he attracted people who admired his unconventionality – Prince Philip of Greece became one of his better-known drinking partners. Roye’s photographs were soon noticed by London publishers – Routledge brought out his first book of nudes, Perfect Womanhood, in 1938. The combination of health, sex and a certain innocence appealed very much to a generation which had been nurtured on European ideas of health and efficiency. The pictures were also perhaps an escape from the preoccupations with war and social discord which permeated Thirties Britain.
Roye’s startling depiction of a nude model wearing a gas mask while pinned to a crucifix caused controversy during the Munich crisis of 1938; during the war, however, Roye’s imagination was used to full effect by the Ministry of Information, with whom he helped to compose a propaganda photograph of a Nazi officer caught in flagrante with two call girls hinting at Nazi decadence and corruption. He also worked closely with Christopher Clayton Hutton in MI9, the department devoted to prisoner-of-war escape tactics.
Before the war Roye had become the first photographer to have a nude published in a national newspaper, the Daily Mirror, and afterwards he was quickly back into his stride, selling more than two million nude portraits worldwide by mail order. After the end of the Second World War, Roye’s photography business was undamaged. Unlike many of his innovative contemporaries, who had seen their studios collapse during the war, Roye found that there was an even greater demand for his nude studies. The “pin-up” had become a part of popular culture and home-grown stars such as Diana Dors were wildly successful. The Rank Organization commissioned him to picture its starlets, and he worked on a new technique, the Roye-Vala 3-D stereoscopic process, which resulted in the booklet Diana Dors in 3-D.
It is difficult to think of an equivalent of Horace Roye in today’s climate, when the celebrity image is so carefully controlled and the concept of the nude photograph is so mediated by politics and fashion. Difficult too, when looking back at Roye’s photographs, to think that they were ever considered daring or even dangerous, with their clean-limbed girls tastefully posing in the great outdoors. Roye, always helped the police when they were investigating obscene pictures, but nevertheless, Roye came into conflict with the new morality of the 1950’s, when he was prosecuted for failing to retouch or airbrush out the pubic hair of a model called Desire in his anthology Unique Editions Number One (1958). He successfully defended himself in court, arguing that the representation of beauty should be untrammeled by prudery. Though acquitted, he moved to Ireland to avoid the controversy, but found himself in an even more unforgiving sexual milieu.
Roye told his own story in Unique Verdict: the story of an unsuccessful prosecution (1960) and, in many ways, it was his artistic swansong. His kind of photography was rapidly going out of fashion, as the voluptuousness of Dors was replaced by the waifishness of Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. Women’s liberation would only begin to be a force in the next decade, but the idea of the pin-up, however tastefully presented, was rapidly losing currency. Always adaptable, Roye became a property developer on the Algarve coast of Portugal. Well known for his right-wing views, he supported the Portuguese dictator Salazar, and, after the revolution of 1974, felt that his position in Portugal was untenable. On his return to England, he found a country which he hardly recognized, in which the social order was changing rapidly, and in which photography had become a sober and almost puritan art form. There was certainly no place for Roye’s innocuous nudes in mid-1970’s Britain and before too long he was traveling again, this time to the Kasbah in Rabat, where, with his third wife, Marilyn, he settled for the rest of his life. In 2002 at the age of 96, Roye was stabbed to death by an intruder at his home in the Kasbah of Rabat, Morocco.
GOOD LUCK!!!
Bidding starts low so BID NOW!!! for a great deal and you might WIN!!!
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