A Woman of No Importance.

London: John Lane at the Sign of the Bodley Head,, 1894. Attractively bound First edition, trade issue, one of 500 copies printed; a further 50 copies were also issued on handmade paper. An attractively bound copy, with the bookplate to the rear pastedown of the eccentric sportsman and artist William Eden (1849-1915), father of future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and who, like Wilde, had a dispute with the artist James McNeill Whistler. Eden excelled at a range of sports from boxing and horse riding to shooting, "the epitome of the sporting squire" (ODNB), a member of several clubs and well known in London society. So too was he a keen amateur artist and aesthete, building a fine collection of paintings, and was a member of the aristocratic group The Souls. The contrast between the sportsman and the aesthete has been noted: "There was little that was harmonious in his nature, and the aesthetic side warred with and exacerbated, rather than complemented, his athleticism, making him a bored sportsman and a militant aesthete. As he grew older, the world's failure to correspond to his ideals drove him to furious rages and the debased taste of humanity confirmed his atheism - for how could a God have made such a botch of things?" (ibid). His dispute with Whistler was occasioned when Eden commissioned a portrait of his wife, which Whistler executed, but then kept the cheque without handing over the painting, leading to a legal case which resulted in Whistler's book The Baronet and the Butterfly (1899). Wilde too had a lengthy rivalry with Whistler, out of the courts, but with very public sparring. Small quarto (204 x 148 mm). Early 20th-century pink straight-grain morocco for Hatchards of Piccadilly, spine lettered in gilt, pink cloth sides, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, pink silk page marker. Bound without initial blank. A few pencilled lines in margins. Spine lightly sunned, very light rubbing at extremities, slight split in hinge preceding dedication leaf, contents clean; an excellent copy. Mason 364.