ALBUM AMICORUM – ‘Tributes to the Red Cross, collected by Sir John Squire and Viscount Sudley’, album containing artwork, autograph quotations and signatures from artists, writers, politicians and royalty, [Britain], 1941-1944.

ALBUM AMICORUM – ‘Tributes to the Red Cross, collected by Sir John Squire and Viscount Sudley’, album containing artwork, autograph quotations and signatures from artists, writers, politicians and royalty, [Britain], 1941-1944.

128 written or decorated pages, 257 x 200mm, original pagination 1-117 followed here, decorative title-page drawn by Stephen Gooden R.A., dedication page signed by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (23 June 1947), explanatory preface signed and initialled by Sir John Squire, calligraphic contents list of 117 contributors followed by the pages containing watercolours, drawings and other artworks, autograph quotations and signatures. Original presentation brown morocco gilt binding, lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. Provenance: Bookplate of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester; patron of the Red Cross & St John Fund.
Some sheets: The Red Cross sale; Christie's, London, June 1940 (various lots)
On behalf of HRH the Duke of Gloucester's Red Cross and St. John Fund; sold Sotheby's, London, 6 December 1944, lot 646 (£300 to Maggs Bros. (probably on behalf of HRH the Duke of Gloucester.))

A supreme act of wartime patriotism and celebration of the Red Cross: an album containing contributions collected across the pantheon of artists, writers, poets, politicians and royalty resident in Britain in the early 1940s. The 117 contributors include: Winston Churchill (signature), Siegfried Sassoon (‘Everyone Sang’, autograph fair-copy poem signed), Walter de la Mare, Ralph Vaughan Williams (autograph musical quotation signed, 13 October 1943), Arthur Bliss (autograph musical quotation, London, 19 September 1942), Jacob Epstein (‘Grandchild’, charcoal drawing signed, 9 October 1941), Lord Berners, Osbert Lancaster, Sir Max Beerbohm (‘Swinburne and Watts-Dunton', watercolour signed, 1941), Edith Sitwell, Augustus John, Stephen Spender (autograph fair-copy sonnet signed, 24 September 1943), Vita Sackville-West, Sir Edwin Lutyens (watercolour drawing of his Cenotaph signed), Cecil Beaton, E.H. Shepard, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Evelyn Waugh, George Bernard Shaw, Osbert Sitwell, T.S. Eliot (autograph quotation signed from Murder in the Cathedral, 29 July 1942), Rex Whistler (‘Message from Mars’, grisaille watercolour signed, 17 June 1942), J.B. Priestley, E.M. Forster (autograph quotation signed from Howards End, October 1941), and Laurence Binyon, along with ambassadors, presidents and royalty.

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Pre-Lot Text
To be sold in aid of the British Red Cross, property from T.R.H. The Dukes of Gloucester