WILKIE, David. Samuel COUSINS, engraver. ~ The Maid of Saragossa. Engraved by Samuel Cousins, A.R.A from the Original Picture in the Royal Collection, painted in Madrid by Sir David Wilkie. London: [J. Moyes for] F. G. Moon, [1837].
8vo (162 × 104 mm), pp. 16, plus folding etched plate with letterpress commentary. Original printed yellow wrappers, stitched. Very slightly dusty and creased, but an excellent survival.
First edition of this rare explanatory pamphlet issued to accompany the 1837 issue of Samuel Cousins’ popular engraving after Wilkie. The engraved key gives a numbered explanation of the picture while the text gives the historical account, complete with excerpts from Byron.
David Wilkie’s celebrated painting of 1828, immediately purchased for the Royal Collection commemorates the two-month siege of Saragossa in 1808, when the local guerrilla leader Don José de Palafox y Melci led heroic, ill-equipped citizens to victory. This episode in the Spanish struggle for independence from Napoleon had also been commemorated in poetry and prose, most notably by Byron in ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’. In the picture Agostina Zaragoza (the ‘Maid of Saragossa’) lights the fuse in the cannon which Palafox, dressed as a volunteer, directs with Father Consolaçion, an Augustinian friar. Worldcat lists the Harvard copy only.