(In collaboration with Rico Lebrun) Underside of Tortoise (from: The Encantadas, by Herman Melville)

 

Leonard Baskin

  1922 - 2000 (biography)

1963  

woodcut on tinted paper 

16 15/16 x 14 7/8" image size 

pencil: Lebrun, lower left; Baskin, lower right 

proof, outside the edition of 150 

 

Fern & O'Sullivan 443 

green, laid Shogun 

proof 

Gehenna Press 

15806 

$1,000.00 

From a collaboration between Rico Lebrun, who did the drawings, and Leonard Baskin, who did the woodcuttings, for a series of seven woodcuts illustrating Herman Melville's The Encantadas. Melville wrote, concerning the "Two Sides to a Tortoise":

"Moreover, everyone knows that tortoises as well as turtle are of such a make that if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides without the possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into view the other. But after you have done this, and because you have done this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright, keep it turned up perpetually if you can, but be honest, and don't deny the black. Neither should he who cannot turn the tortoise from its natural position so as to hide the darker and expose his livelier aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun, for that cause declare the creature to be one total inky blot".