THE SILENT TRAVELER; A Chinese Artist in Lakeland / With a Preface by Herbert Read
London: Country Life Ltd, 1942. Chiang Yee. Early Reprint during WW-II. Cloth. Tall 8vo / Royal 8vo (8 7/8" x 5 3/4"), gray cloth with black lettering on spine & front cover (using English & Chinese), Preface by Herbert Read, illustrated with frontispiece and 12 B&W brush paintings with Chinese & English captions, archival polyester-protected pictorial dust jacket (unclipped), 66, [67] pages. Good + / Very Good. Item #7002
Chiang Yee (Jiang Yi) (1903 – 1977), self-styled as "The Silent Traveller," was a Chinese official, poet, author, scholar, American professor, teacher, painter and calligrapher.
Formerly the governor of several districts in Nationalist China, he left China for England in 1933, and began a distinguished career as a deeply perceptive author and painter of special locations around the world.
He taught at Columbia University, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences & Royal Society of Arts, and holder of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellowship of Poetry (1958) at Harvard.
Preface by [Sir] Herbert Read, DSO, MC (1893 – 1968), who was a distinguished English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, widely respected for numerous books on art.
Yee's brush paintings and commentary on the Lake Country / "Lakeland" is one of his earlier, more SCARCE artistic creations. To have it in an unclipped and nearly complete, bright dust jacket is a RARITY.
Overall, a Very Good copy. Tight without marks by previous owners. Its principal defects are foxing to the half title and page edges. Plates are clean and NOT foxed. Areas covered are: Wastwater, Derwentwater, Buttermere and Crummockwater, Windermere, Ridal Water and Grasmere. WORDSWORTH'S LAKE COUNTRY evoked by a scholarly Zen brushmaster.
This is a SUPERIOR COPY of a First Edition of Yee's wonderfully illustrated and perceptive travelogue. (Images shown are before adding Mylar.) 'Twould make a Splendid Gift!
Price: $95.00