Album von Berlin with Cover by Jessie Marion King, c. 1900

Secessionist-style cover design by Jessie M. King (signed lower right in the plate) This is a photographic album of the Berlin’s “high points,” featuring the Brandenburg Gate and an aerial view of the city. Fingering to cover, bumped corners. Very good internally.

In 1899, Jessie Marion King received her first large-scale commission, in the form of a series of German book designs. On the recommendation of her teacher Fra Newbery, Georg Wertheim, the owner of a large department store in Berlin, employed the artist to design the covers and endpapers for a series of books showcasing photographs of German cities and landmarks. King ultimately designed four covers for the project, which were published by Wertheim’s associated firm of Globus Verlag. The Album Von Berlin was one of these. The first design featured an art nouveau figure of a woman which was withdrawn from sale when a complaint was received from ‘an influential person, possibly the Kaiser (who was known to dislike Art Nouveau)’ suggesting that the cover was inappropriate for a book of photographs of the German capital. This is her second cover design.

Born at New Kilpatrick, Dunbartonshire, King enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art at the age of 17 where she studied and taught alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh and was heavily influenced by Art Nouveau and the developing ‘Glasgow Style‘. In 1898 she won a Queen’s Prize in the South Kensington National Art Competition and in 1902 won the gold medal for book design at the Turin exhibition. She taught at Glasgow School of Art from 1902-1908. King developed a distinctive and popular style of outline illustration, but also designed fabrics, wallpaper, costumes and interiors, as well as ceramics and silver for Liberty’s of London. In 1908 she married the painter and designer E.A. Taylor, and they later moved to Paris to run the Shealing Atelier. The couple returned to Scotland on the outbreak of the First World War, setting up a small artists’ community in Kirkcudbright.