UPB Rare Books
Featured Book Artist: The Evanescent Miss Ethel Reed
Ethel Reed was the most celebrated and original book artist in Boston during her brief but prolific career in the late 1890s. She was raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where as a young girl she apprenticed to miniaturist Laura Coombs Hills. She later studied at the Cowles School in Boston, notably with Art & Crafts book artist (and neo-Gothic architect) Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. As a student, Reed began designing posters for the Boston Herald. Between 1895 and 1897, she produced about two dozen book posters, in addition to illustrating books, and designing bindings and endpapers for the small literary presses of Lamson, Wolfe and Co. and Copeland & Day.
Reed’s style, drawing on the sensuous lines of art nouveau, was brilliant and eccentric, like that of her contemporary Aubrey Beardsley. She was certainly guilty of what Boston’s Soci-ety of Arts and Crafts called “specious originality”, and in that sense her sensibilities were decidedly modern. Her illustrations often feature female figures surrounded by lush floral forms that, like Georgia O’Keefe’s, have inspired fevered speculation over their (presumed) illicit meanings.
Publisher and photographer F. Holland Day incorporated the young Miss Reed into his Bohemian salon, where she vamped for his campy portraits. The wider arts establishment, while acknowledging her skill, was scarcely encouraging. In the “Woman’s Number” of Bradley: His Book, Will Bradley granted that Miss Reed might be the single exception to the rule that women in the graphic arts “lack inventiveness”. Reed was the only woman ever to be profiled in The Poster, a magazine devoted to this fashionable new art form. Still, critic S. C. de Soissons had difficulty seeing past her gender: “… While she executes pictures with clever hands, she sees with her own and not masculine eyes; her work has feminine quali-ties, one sees in it a woman, full of sweetness and delicacy, and this is the greatest praise one can bestow upon a woman.”
Reed’s promising career ended under mysterious circumstances. She became engaged to the painter Philip Hale in 1895, but the romance apparently sputtered. In May, 1896 she traveled to Britain, where she designed posters for publisher John Lane, and met the ro-mantic novelist Richard Le Gallienne — with whom she had an affair, if the London papers are to be believed. She returned to England in 1897 to work on another poster for Le Gal-lienne. Reed apparently traveled on to Ireland, and then disappeared altogether.
It is rumored that she may have enrolled in the Royal College of Music, to pursue an early passion for the violin. A 1901 British census shows one Ethel Reed living in London, a single mother with a four-month-old son. It is also rumored that she went blind, which would explain the sudden curtailment of her career. What is certain is that she died some-time before 1925, when Gallienne praised the loss of the “noble, silent beauty” that was Ethel Reed.