CASEMENT, Roger. Original Lithograph drawn on stone from Life (1916) by Prof. L. Fanto, Art Director, State Theatre, Saxony. Limited to 350 copies

(Out of series). Framed and glazed. In large folder. 406 x 280mm. In very good condition.

Roger Casement (1864-1916), was born in Sandycove, Dublin. Both his parents died when he was young and he was raised by an aunt in Ulster and educated at Ballymena Academy. He was employed in the British Consular Service from 1895 to 1913, from which position he exposed cruelties in the Congo and on the rubber plantations of Brazil, where he was Consul-General. Knighted in 1911, he joined the Irish Volunteer movement a year later and Sinn Féin in 1914 when he went to Germany looking for arms. In April 1916 the Germans despatched a ship, the ‘Aud’, with a cargo of arms to be landed in Kerry for use in the Easter Rising, Casement followed in a submarine and landed on Banna Strand where he was captured, taken to London and tried for high treason. He was found guilty and hanged on 3rd August in the same year.
Early in the 1930s Colm O Lochlainn acquired the lithographic stone on which Fanto had drawn the best surviving portrait of Casement. Issued in a limited edition of 350 copies. Proceeds of the sale of these drawings were given to the Irish Academy of Letters (founded by Yeats and Shaw) for the annual Casement Prize. The definitive portrait of Casement, widely published, including on a commemorative Irish postage stamp issue in 1966.