art & architecture

A rare modernising of Hogarth’s hugely popular series, first published in 1732, with numerous later copies and adaptation in image and word. This set gives extended captions describing the fall of Miss Ann Hackabout and updates the costumes and settings. We can locate only the Illinois copy anywhere. Not in the BM catalogue,

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.

First edition of this rather extraordinary survey of Curzon’s many appearances in caricature in Hindi Punch and other Indian comic papers, where he often appears in Indian dress and frequently as various Hindu deities (notably Ganesh). ‘This unpretentious little book is offered as a humble souvenir of the Delhi Durbar: in its pages our popular Viceroy, as representative in the great Coronation Durbar, of the greatest monarch of modern times, is the central figure. In a land of her-worship it is not to be marvelled that the energy, versatility and strong personality of Lord Curzon, added to his many loveable traits, should lend themselves easily to the genius of the Indian artist for caricaturing’ (author’s Preface).

Despite this warm introduction, Curzon was subject to both approval and dissent through these images. The satire of British comic publications like Punch was enthusiastically appropriated by Indian artists - and India itself was frequently represented through the figure of Mr Punch - though their caricatures were also influenced by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma. It is a fascinating fusion.

An early seventeenth-century heraldic pedigree of the Offley family of Madeley (Staffordshire) with the arms of their prominent dynasty of London guildsmen, which include Henry Offley (d. 1613) who had married Mary, the daughter of Sir John White Lord Mayor of London; and Thomas Offley (1501-1582), a successful wool and cloth merchant — Lord Mayor of London in 1556. Also in the lineage is Stephen Jenyns (1453-1523) another important London Lord Mayor with Wolverhampton origins whose arms are accompanied by an elaborate cartouche noting his mayoralty. An early docket on the verso (legible with ultra-violet light) reads: ‘The Pedigree of Stephen Jenings’.

The youngest member of the Offley family shown is John (b. 1586). He was educated at Middle Temple and married in 1605. He was knighted in April 1615, served as sheriff of Staffordshire in 1616-17 and was a magistrate for the county by 1621. 1625-6 he was MP for Stafford. Another contemporary version of the pedigree is described in the Staffordshire Visitation of 1614:

‘Quarterly — 1. Argent, on a cross fleurettée azure a lion passant-guardant or [OFFLEY]; 2. Azure, a chevron between two eagles displayed in chief and a lion passant in base or [NECHELLS]; 3. Argent, a chevron gules between three plummets sable [JENNINGS]; 4. Azure, a tiger passant or [LANE]. CREST— A demi-lion rampant-guardant or, holding an olive branch vert, fructed gold’ (’Heraldic Visitations of Staffordshire in 1614 and 1663-64’, in History of Staffordshire, 1884).

First edition. One of 1040 copies, this one of 940 on Hollande.

Copy number 50 of 750 copies of the limited edition, signed by the illustrator. Edward Detmold was the longest surviving of the two tragic Detmold twins who had attracted the attention of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones as children and young artists. Edward’s brother Maurice had committed suicide in 1908, after producing numerous highly regarded prints at the turn of the century. Edward himself continued to make prints and publish illustrated books until his own suicide in 1957. Animals and birds were their primary subjects and to varying degrees, their prints exhibit the clear influence of the Japanese master printmakers.

Number 381 of 485 copies on paper (there were also 15 on vellum). Along with Troilus and Criseyde and The Four Gospels, The Canterbury Tales is one of the high points of the Golden Cockerel Press. It perhaps stands above above all in Gill’s masterful designs, forming, as Colin Franklin pointed out an integral part of the book’s success — ‘not quite illustration but far transcending decoration’. ‘The balance of text and illustration goes further than typography... Most of the borders are leaf and stem, but among the leaves, hiding or beckoning, climbing or leaning out, are girls and men, kings and boys, priests and nuns who take part or seem to be commenting on the stories. A young man is whistling across the page, two fingers at his mouth, to a girl; Chaucer himself waves to a little god of love facing across his own poem; a sad lover looks over to Christ crucifies; Pan blows pipes and a naked girl, hearing him, prepares to climb her tree; a nineteen-twentyish girl climbs up, and a sad young bearded man looking like Robert Gibbings sits, supporting the whole tree’s weight, opposite; Chaucer is writing with confidence under the leaves, taking it down by dictation from the naughty spirit looking down and over the lines. So the pattern continues, affectionate and cheeky, erotic, enjoyable and relevant, decorative and explanatory, a balance of taste and eye’ (Franklin). Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

Number 183 of 225 copies. Troilus and Criseyde is the first of the three outstanding Golden Golden Cockerel Press editions produced by Robert Gibbings and Eric Gill (the others being The Canterbury Tales and the The Four Gospels). The Middle English text was edited by Arundell del Re, the compositors were F. Young and A.H. Gibbsand the pressman, A.C Cooper.

Gill’s woodcuts include portraits of Chaucer: one depicting him with Cupid whispering in his ear, the other shows him writing Troilus. There are four full page illustrations, one at the beginning of each book, while every page has a tall border facing each other across each opening. In these Gill successfully re-imagined the borders of medieval manuscripts in which the images do more than simply decorate the margins, but work in interplay with the text — marking, illustrating and commenting with varying degrees of transparency, subtlety, eroticism and humour. ‘They rank very high in the range of Gill’s work’ (Franklin, p. 142).

Provenance: Sotheby’s, 10^th July 2001, lot 369.
Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

First edition, copy number 7 of 100, of this sumptuously illustrated version of the story of the Queen of Sheba, combining illustrations by Barbier and the Abyssinian artist Michel Engueda-Work. French scholar, traveller and diplomat, Hughes Le Roux had transcribed parts of the Ethiopian chronicle Kebra Nagast in 1904, with the help of local scholars, from a manuscript looted by the British at Maqdala and subsequently returned. The Kebra Nagast or ‘The Glory of the Kings,’ is a fourteenth-century national epic of Ethiopia, written in Geʽez by the nebure id Ishaq of Aksum. In its existing form, the text is at least 700 years old and purports to trace the origins of the Solomonic dynasty, a line of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian monarchs who ruled the country (until 1974), to the biblical king, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The story of the text’s survival is interesting. The Battle of Maqdala, the last struggle in the British Expedition to Abyssinia, led to significant looting by the victorious British forces, who took Emperor Tewodros II’s crown along with ceremonial crosses, chalices, weapons and the holy icon Kwer’ata Re’esu along with two fine manuscripts of the Kebra Nagast which found their way to the British Museum (catalogued as Oriental MS 818 and 819 respectively). 819 was returned to Ethiopia in 1872 on the request of the Abyssinian king, who identified it as a fundamental source of law. Hugues Le Roux, a French envoy from the President of the French Republic to Menyelek II, King of Ethiopia, later went to Addis Alem in order to see this manuscript and to obtain his permission to translate it into French. He notes in his introduction here the inscription ‘This volume was returned to the King of Ethiopia by order of the Trustees of the British Museum, Dec. 14th, 1872’. Of the artist Michel Engueda-Work who is referred to elsewhere as an ‘Abyssinian artist’, almost nothing else is known, but his illustrations are of course far truer to the Ethiopian style than Barbier’s highly exoticised and eroticised interpretations, in which Sheba is portrayed (following long tradition) as a white woman.

Number 150 of 150 copies, signed by the publisher (there were also 20 additional publisher’s copies). Joseph Charles Mardrus was best known as a translator into French of the Arabian Nights. He was born in Cairo of Armenian parents and studied in Lebanon before settling in Paris. As a doctor for the French government, he worked throughout Morocco and the Far East. Carteret IV, 263.

One of 125 copies (this an unnumbered hors série copy) of a superb illustrated book with colour wood engravings designed by art deco master François-Louis Schmied and engraved by his son Théo, each printed successively from multiple blocks.
Author Lucien Désiré Prosper Graux known as Lucien Graux (1878-1944) was a French doctor, entrepreneur, art collector, bibliophile, writer, publisher and member of the French Resistance in his final years (he was arrested and murdered at Dachau in 194). He had amassed one of the finest French book collections of his era and operated a small publishing house, the ‘Amis du Docteur Lucien-Graux’. This orientalist fanstasy Le Tapis de Prières was the house’s 24th production, the first in quarto. Carteret, Illustrés IV, p. 255, ‘édition originale et premier tirage recherché et coté’; Ritchie, François-Louis Schmied, p. 41.

Number 58 of 1500 copies, signed in pencil by Henri Matisse (a further 250 copies of the edition were additionally signed by Joyce). This is the first illustrated edition of Ulysses, though Matisse chose to supply illustrations of the Calypso episodes of Homer’s Odyssey corresponding to the six episodes of the novel as his artist’s response to Joyce’s text (which, it is often said, he never finished reading). He thus confounded both the publisher, George Macy, and most of the public on its first publication. The Limited Edition Club edition owes its existence to the lifting of the American ban on the novel in December 1933. Henri Matisse, L’Oeuvre gravé, 235-240; Slocum & Cahoon, 22.

First edition. Blondel (1705-1774) was among the most influential French architects of his day and De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance provides one of the most extensive and best-illustrated accounts of Enlightenment taste in both houses and gardens with its many plates, elevations and plans. This copy is of the second issue, giving ‘rue Dauphine’ as the printer’s address, issued without half-titles or errata, but otherwise identical to the first issue of the same year.

‘As a teacher, first in his own school (1743–54) and later at the Académie Royale d’Architecture, Blondel influenced such students as the Scottish architect William (later Sir William) Chambers, best known for his Somerset House for the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1776; later replaced); the French architect Richard Mique, who did much work for Marie-Antoinette at Versailles’ (Ency. Brit.). Fowler 49.

First edition of this superbly illustrated account of Girardin’s garden at Ermenonville, which was inspired both by the philosophy of Rousseau and the English landscape gardens of the eighteenth century. It was to become Rousseau’s resting place, within an elaborate tomb on an island in the Lac de peupliers. The delightful aquatint plates here depict the philosophical temple, picturesque grottoes and torrents. It as reprinted in 1811. Much of what Girardin created was destroyed in the Revolutionary era. Cohen-De Ricci 439; Hunt 695.

A separately issued suite, presumably produced for sale in America, of Von Bayros’extraordinary illustrations (reproduced from watercolours) for the elaborate edition of Dante issued by Amalthea in Vienna in 1921.

One of 237 copies (number 211, one of 185 on Vélin de Montval). Sylvain Sauvage ws the pseudonym of the artist Félix Roy (1888-1948). He later illustrated the Nonesuch edition of Candide. Worldcat lists no copies outside continental Europe.

Number 40 of 110 copies printed for the Société des Amis des Livres, this one for Baron Roger Portalis (a founder member of this bibliophilic circle, and an eminent historian of engraving) This is an especially elegant belle-époqe edition of the Parnassian poet Leconte de Lisle’s first collection (first published in 1852) with a sequence of highly-refined illustrations by Maurice Ray. The binding is by Georges Huser (1879-1961), who had worked for binders David, Noulhac and Lemardeley before establishing himself independently as the latter’s successor in 1903.

Number 47 of 95 copies on Hollande (after three on Vieux Japon and seven on Japon impérial) with superb illustrations by the Russian-born Montparnasse artist Alexeieff, who was later better known for pioneering pinscreen animation. The bold typography is accompanied by large red initials, specially cut and cast for this edition after designs by R. Van Kleen, while the striking lithographs were printed by Duchâtel and coloured at the ateliers d’Art Nervet. Giraudoux’s novel was first published in 1922 and tells the story of the French soldier who forged an unlikely career as a German lawyer following total amnesia brought on by an injury sustained fighting in the Great War. It was published in more than one illustrated edition of the 1920s, but Alexeieff’s strange, teasing and often ambiguous images are especially well suited to the text. Rare: Worldcat cites the Northwestern University copy as the only US institutional holding. No UK copies in LibraryHub.

First edition with the extraordinary decadent illustrations by ‘Alastair’ (pseudonym of German-born artist Hand Venning Voight). It is one of the most attractive books of the Black Sun Press, founded and operated in Paris by the American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby. The translation from the French is Ernest Dowson’s (which had first appeared in 1898, commissioned by Leonard Smithers). This is one of 1000 copies on Moirans paper (after 15 Japon and 5 hors commerce copies). Minkoff A-31.

First edition of Boylesve’s modern-day fairytale, with Barbier’s illustrations (the story first appeared in 1920). One of 300 copies (this one on standard paper).