Caractères des Passions gravés par Bernard Picart sur les desseins…

Small folio (380 × 236 mm). Engraved title and 13 leaves of plates of which each has 4 separate images printed from small plates (52 in total, complete). Occasional trivial spotting and minor thumbing. Uncut, with old paired stitch holes in upper margins, nineteenth century cloth-backed marbled boards, upper cover with red morocco label lettered and decorated in gilt, spine lettered ‘Pictura’ on gilt. Slightly rubbed and soiled. Small old stamp ‘Pictura Groningen’ to title (see below) and shelf mark (57).

A complete set of the small plates for Le Brun’s influential artists’ manual, Conférence sur l’expression générale des passions (lectures at the French Académie royale given between 1668 and 1678, but not printed until 1698). They are preserved in their original uncut state, four plates to an uncut sheet. Each sheet retains the stab holes for stitching in oblong format, probably the form in which they were issued by Picart, with the plates reorientated here when bound on guards in the nineteenth century. They were evidently sold separately, uncut as here, but were also issued dissected with the small format editions of the Conférence.

Le Brun had lectured on the expression of emotions and produced a set of drawings to illustrate tranquility, admiration, desire, apprehension, joy, sadness, contempt and hatred, jealousy, and despair and fury. The lectures and the illustrations (’expressive heads’) were not published until 1698, when they appeared as Caractères des Passions which swiftly became one of the principal artists’ manual and was reprinted several times within a few decades, including in English. These Picart plates ‘correspond to [the first edition] with the addition of eleven new plates, except for fig. no. 34. Here, for the first time, the previously rather strange head-dress of this figure has been clearly represented as a metal helmet, thus making it easier to recognise in it Rhosaces, the man about to strike Alexander in the Battle of the Granicus’ (Montagu).

This set bears the stamp and spine title of the Pictura Groningen (the stamp being Lugt 2028); a print collection now widely dispersed. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. The Origin and Influence of Chalres Le Brun’s Conférence sur lexpression générale et particulière (Yale, 1994) B.8.