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ORPEN, William.
An Onlooker in France, 1917-1919.
First edition. This copy inscribed in pencil on the front free endpaper beneath a full-page pencil sketch of the artist at work; "To Miss Elsie de Wolfe from the person who attempted to write this book - the above shows the method by which the attempt was made. I also wish to express my thanks to her for having bought it and for the kind things she has said about it. William Orpen, Paris, 1921." The drawing shows the artist working by candlelight, hunched over the manuscript, pen delicately poised in his hand, his little finger exquisitely crooked. Before him are a bottle and soda siphon, and the inevitable packet of cigarettes. With a tipped-in two-page autograph letter signed by Orpen on the stationery of the Hôtel des Réservoirs, Versailles, explaining that he left "without saying goodbye as there were so many people - and I was shy … I am so pleased that you like my attempt at a book - it surprises me some people do - as when I read it now it seems so personal that I cannot imagine it interesting any one else than myself." With a clipped "obituary" by H. J. Greenwall tipped onto the endpapers. Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, was a remarkable figure. The daughter of a New York doctor, she is credited with having invented the profession of interior designer. Her clients included Anne Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson and Adelaide and Henry Clay Frick, and she alleviated the typically dark, heavy Victorian design of their wealthy homes with light, fresh colours and eighteenth-century French furniture. During the War she served as a Red Cross nurse in France, afterwards remaining in Paris and renting "the Villa Trianon at Versailles, where she entertained lavishly" (ODNB, Charles Mendl). Orpen remarks in his letter that "your place looked heavenly." When she married Sir Charles Mendl, a British diplomat, in 1926, she was already notorious for her unconcealed lesbian relationship with Elisabeth "Bessy" Marbury: as the Times delicately phrased it, "When in New York she makes her home with Miss Elizabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Shortly after her marriage she scandalized the Parisian diplomatic world by attending a fancy-dress ball dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer, making her entrance turning handsprings, an event commemorated by Cole Porter; "When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up / Now turns a handspring landing up- / On her toes / Anything goes!"
Quarto. Original sage green buckram, title gilt to spine. Portrait frontispiece of Earl Haig, and 95 other plates. De Wolfe's Villa Trianon book-stamp to the front free endpaper and once to the text. Slightly rubbed and a number of spots to the boards, spine sunned, a little rolled, endpapers a touch browned, scattered foxing to the prelims, but a very good copy.
