Artur (Arthur) Barbosa – ‘Surprise Surprise’

£1,500.00

1 in stock

Pencil, watercolour, and gouache, highlighted with white and gum arabic on paper. This picture is an unpublished design for the book; “The Memoirs of Coral Pearl, the erotic reminiscences of a flamboyant 19th-century courtesan,” pub; Granada 1983. We are currently holding two other related watercolours by the artist.

Image: 12 1/8 x 12 1/8 in. (31 x 31 cm.)
Mount: 17 7/8 x 17 5/8 in. (45.5 x 44.8 cm.)

Illustrated on page 340 in the book “Barbosa – The Man Who Drew Flashman” by Lawrence Blackmore. Pub; The Book Palace Ltd, 2017.

Description

This illustration can be confidently traced to text in the Blatchford version of ‘The Memoirs of Cora Pearl’ where Pearl enters a room and is unexpectedly surprised to see a naked man with a short moustache standing in a bathtub. Chapter nine, page 167.

Lawrence Blackmore points out that the first publication in 1886 of ‘Mèmoires de Cora Pearl’ was greatly anticipated but proved to be a disappointment. The names of the key players were only thinly disguised and the accounts of her sexual exploits and frivolities only tamely recounted. It quickly went out of print and disappeared. In 1983 Granada published ‘The Memoirs of Cora Pearl’ edited by William Blatchford. Barbosa designed the dust jacket. Blatchford claimed to have located a later volume of Cora Pearl’s memoirs, published in 1890 after her death that was decidedly more frank and sexually explicit than its predecessor. These ‘discovered’ memoirs proved to be a hoax, the real author being Derek Parker, a former Chairman of the Society of Authors and well known for his books on astrology, co-authored with his wife.