Roger Casement - 1916 Lithograph drawn on stone from life (Limited Edition)

An extremrly rare Limited Edition reproduction of a Roger Casement original  lithograph (itself originally a 350 limited edition) drawn on stone from life in 1916 by Professor L Fanto and signed by the printer and collector Colm O'Lochlainn.

Roger Casement , Irish: Ruairí Dáithí Mac Easmainn (1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916), known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for high treason, for his involvement in trying to otain German support for the Irish cause leading up to the 1916 Rising, during World War I. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat, becoming known as a humanitarian activist, and later as a poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru.

There is simply too much important information on Casement’s well-documented , controversial  and extraordinary life to summarise it here. He was an immense figure in not just Irish revolutionary history but in the history of human rights leading into the 20th Century. If you would like a free and more detailed synopsis of his life, role and capture in 1916 please email a request for same to info@thewaltoncollection.ie.  

As a sidenote, the original collector of this incredible lithograph, Colm Ó Lochlainn,  established the Candle Press in 1916 which was the winner of a bronze medal for bookbinding in 1924.He founded his own press, At the Sign of the Three Candles Press, in 1926. Ó'Lochlainn gave the aspiring piper Seamus Ennis his first job at this press, and Ennis collaborated with him on the Irish Street Ballads books.  Ó'Lochlainn succeeded Seamus Ó Casaide as volunteer editor of Irish Book Lover in 1930 and was an assistant in the Faculty of Modern Irish at University College Dublin from 1933 to 1943, where he later became professor of Irish Language and Literature. He was also associated with the founding of An Óige.

This exquisite reproduction of the original 1916  lithograph on stone, 'drawn from life',  on which Ó'Lochainn's signature can be clearly read,  is a truly remarkable collector's item and each of these 250 limited edition  prints comes with a numbered certificate from The Walton Collection. 

Printed on 210 gsm satin art paper, and beautifully mounted on a mottled green suede background it is set behind glass in a handmade, aged dark mahogany finish frame with a gold gilt sightline.