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PROOF OF CANCEL COVER
BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY
![The proof of the cancelled cover image, in portrait orientation, combines Beardsley’s pen-and-ink design with letterpress. The title: “THE SAVOY” [caps] appears in the top quarter of the page, with the text “AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY” [caps, italics] centered below. One row down the text “No. 1” is aligned on the left side, with the text “Price 2/6 net” in the same line but aligned to the right. Centered in the line below is the text “January 1896.” A tall woman stands in the bottom left foreground, rising up two-thirds of the page to meet the bottom of the title. She is turned to the right and her face appears in two-thirds profile. She is dressed in a full-length gown with horizontal stripes and an overcoat with buttons of the same material on top. She has a white hood attached to her overcoat and dark voluminous hair worn down around her face. In her white-gloved hand is a riding crop at rest. In the central foreground a putto, or young cherub-like boy, appears naked apart from a striped overcoat, plumed hat, and bowed slippers. He is turned to the right with a hand on his hip and his other hand holding a tasseled staff that is taller than he is. He appears to be urinating on The Yellow Book, which appears in the grasses at the bottom of the image, just right of centre. Flowers and plants grow up along the bottom edge of the page in the foremost ground. A herm (a male head and torso on a pillar) stands to the left and in the background of the woman. An ornamented sundial sits in the mid-ground behind the putto. A deciduous tree protrudes taller than the rest of the forest in the central background. A pond is just in front of the forest in the mid-ground, with a Stowe rotunda emerging halfway behind trees to the right of the pond. The signature “AUBREY BEARDSLEY, 1896.” [caps] appears in the bottom right corner of the page, within a rectangular box. The page is surrounded by a double-lined rectangle.](https://1890s.ca/wp-content/uploads/beardsley_savoy_resized..jpg "Proof of Cancel Cover, Savoy vol. 1")
Aubrey Beardsley. Proof of original (cancelled) design for front cover of The Savoy, vol. 1, January 1896. Courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press.
MLA citation:
Beardsley, Aubrey. “Cancel Cover.” The Savoy, vol. 1, January 1896, proof. Savoy Digital Edition, edited by Christopher Keep and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 2018-2019. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019, https://1890s.ca/savoyv1_beardsley_cancel_cover