The Matador, and other recitative pieces. (With an original watercolour by the author)

London : Hutchinson & Co., 1893. Deluxe edition, limited to 12 numbered and signed copies containing an original watercolour drawing by the author. Small quarto (220 x 180 mm), publisher’s vellum over boards (rubbed) with pictorial device and gilt lettering to upper board, spine lettered in gilt and brown; top edge cut and gilded, fore- and bottom edges uncut; silk moire endpapers; statement on limitation page reads ‘This Edition is limited to Twelve Copies, of which this is No. 6 [in ms.], Hume Nisbet [signature in full]’; frontispiece original watercolour signed and dated in the image ‘Hume Nisbet 1893‘, title with vignette lithographed illustration (off-setting from tissue guard), pp. xii, 185, [2 Press opinions]; a fine example.

A very scarce limited edition of this collection of verse by Scottish-born writer, artist and traveller Hume Nisbet (1849-1923), containing an original watercolour by him. 

Nisbet was a prolific author who published no fewer than 40 novels between 1888 and 1905. He was a great traveller, and closely associated with Australia: in the mid 1860s, as a young man, he made his first visit to the Antipodes, where he spent seven years in Melbourne, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands, painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work. Much of his later fiction writing is based on his experiences during this period. Nisbet managed to pursue an artistic career as well as a literary one: in the mid 1870s in Edinburgh he worked as a scene-painter; in 1878-85 he taught freehand drawing at the Watt Institution and School of Arts; and he also exhibited oil and watercolour paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy. Nisbet would again visit Australia (and New Guinea) in 1886, and Australia for a third time in 1895.

The Matador contains Nisbet’s grotesque poem The Legend of Kum-Kum, about a Chinese immigrant in Far North Queensland who joins the crew of a blackbirding vessel. The skipper poisons him with arsenic, pickles his body in rum and preserves it in a jar; later, when the jar falls into the hands of New Guinea cannibals, they consume the pickled corpse – and the arsenic.

Trove locates no copies of the deluxe issue of The Matador.