[Gothic. Queer] Alexander Ver Huell (Dutch, 1822-1897) Collection of 140 original lithographic plates.

Amsterdam, Gerhard & Compie, 1851- ca. 1854. 4 albums, 1^st,2^nd and 3th eds. Oblong (18 x 18 cm), blind halfcloth. Albums worn, plates overall in fair to good condition. Introductory texts and captions on opposite page.

An incredible collection of illustrations in the grand, dark, black-romantic, cynical, caricature-style 19th-century tradition of Goya, Félicien Rops, Honoré Daumier, Cruikshank, Aubrey Beardsley and Carel de Nerée tot Babberich. Nevertheless, this highly talented artist is now virtually unknown in the Netherlands. He has always been completely unknown in the non-Dutch-speaking art world. Recently, the young, talented art dealer Jonathan den Otter from Rotterdam has changed this by offering works by him once again. The Boijmans van Beuningen Museum has acquired a fine Goya-esque drawing by him.

No other 19th-century Dutch artist has depicted the Romantic Agony as poignantly as Ver Huell. The fact that he took this subject very seriously is also evident from the fact that Ver Huell wrote one of the very few Dutch 19th-century horror/fantasy stories. His 1847 story ‘No. 470, Hogewoerd’ opens as follows:

'The red planks of the scaffold glistened with rain.

A man hung from the gallows, lifeless and motionless. His wet hair clung to his forehead; beneath his closed eyelids, his eyeballs were swollen high, and the fingers of his hands, which he had folded in prayer when the executioner bound them, were drawn up convulsively.’

Also striking in the prints presented here are the various homosocial scenes of intimate friendship and suffering between handsome young men.