Iorana!: A Tahitian Journal

1932

Special Collections DU870.2 G533 1932. Reproduced by permission of the Robert Gibbings Estate and the Heather Chalcroft Literary Agency

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

Iorana was Gibbings’s first work completely self-written and illustrated. Described as ‘uncompromising, slightly bitter and often dark’ (Martin Andrews), Iorana is an imaginary tale based on his 1929 Tahitian travel diary. The print above is called Padanus Grove, Tahiti and was thought by Claire Leighton, fellow engraver and student of Noel Rooke, to typify Gibbings’s style. Andrews quotes Leighton as saying ‘His simple masses of black and white have extra solidity given them by the cross-hatching work with the graver [see tree trunks] which merges the black into the white with a grey’. Leighton believed Gibbings had an ‘exceptional cleanness of outline’. This signed first edition is number 71 of 385.