Bayes, Jessie, calligrapher and illuminator

Songs from Shakespeare. Colophon in MS: "Written & illuminated by Jessie Bayes, Hampstead, London, England, in the year 1914."



Illuminated manuscript on vellum (10 7/8 x 6 1/4 in.; 278 x 160 mm), written in black and blue in a humanistic hand, musical notation in black and burnished gold. Illustration: 18 pages, all richly and profusely illuminated in gold and color, featuring 15 large miniatures within extraordinarily elaborate illuminated borders, 10 fine roundels, 2 large historiated initials (one a mermaid, the other a maiden in repose), 27 illuminated initials all with burnished gold; 4 vellum flyleaves at both front and back. Top edges dusty, first and last blank leaf with some offsetting from binding. Contemporary green morocco by Ellen & Sofita Woolrich, gilt extra, a.e.g.; spine defective, disbound but with both covers preserved.

Anthea Callen, Women of the Arts & Crafts Movement, pp. 186-187; J. Quigley, "The Art of Jessie Bayes, Painter and Craftswoman," in The Studio, LXI (1914), pp. 261-270

A richly illuminated manuscript created by Jessie Bayes, an avowed disciple of William Morris whose calligraphy is characterized by a splendid array of purple, blue, white and gold. The present manuscript is clearly one of her most ambitious. The binding was entrusted to the American women bookbinders Ellen and Sofita Woolrich. As Tidcomb relates, "Ellen (Nelly) G. Woolrich probably learned to bind from Cockerell or from Sangorski and Sutcliffe. She was working at 5 Bloomsbury Square when she exhibited in the A & CES exhibition in 1903 and in Antwerp in 1904. She and her sister Sofita were Americans... and later on, up until 1915, they employed George Fisher to bind books to their designs" (Women Bookbinders, p.173).

Contents: "Who is Silvia?" (from The Two Gentlemen of Verona) with illuminations of Silvia embroidering, an angel playing the lute, and four other angels stringing garlands; "Orpheus with his Lute made Trees" (from Henry VIII) with Orpheus serenading squirrels, deer, a vulture, a lioness, a tiger, a ram, a duck, a bear, a rabbit, a turtle, a snake, a wolf, et al.; "Under the Greenwood Tree" (from As You Like It) with a double-spread scene of an archer and his prey, a stag, chased by four hounds; "Come Live with Me and be My Love" with a large pastoral miniature and a smaller pastoral roundel; "Marriage Songs" with a double-spread procession of peacocks, bridesmaids, and a cornucopia drawn by a white bull festooned with garlands; "Where the Bee sucks there lurk I" (from The Tempest) with a large miniature of Ariel in flight above a village riding on top of a large bat; "O Mistress Mine, Where are You Roaming" (from Twelfth Night) with two lovers in a very charming Pre-Raphaelite landscape; "You Spotted Snakes with Double Tongue" with a large roundel and borders populated by fairies in the style of Richard Dadd; "Come Unto these Yellow Sands" (from The Tempest) with a roundel depicting three maidens dancing at the seaside, and another roundel with Apollo and his chariot; "Come Away, Come Away Death" (from Twelfth Night) with a large miniature of an angel kneeling at a grave, holding a heart pierced with an arrow.