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A striking and moving memorial to a young boy, a vision of a child’s paradise with chromolithograph scrapbook cuttings of birds, horses, children, dancers, flowers and foliage, together with cuttings of hair (some woven). It combines two popular Victorian domestic crafts of hair art and scrapbooking, within an accomplished (but probably also domestic) wooden frame in the gothic style.

A French lithographic stone for printing fruiterer’s labels, for oranges, reine claudes and mirabelle plums, a strikingly solid example of the physical mass of stones used for printing even such ephemeral items as labels. Even this comparatively small stone weighs 14 kg (over 2 stone).

Basil Spence and John Hutton worked together as architect and mural painter for the Society of Mural Painters’ RIBA exhibition in 1953. The scheme that they picked to work on was one for the interior of an office building. David Rock designed an interior with a mezzanine and interesting views throughout. On one side of the room was to be a mural with nine full height muses by John Hutton. Hutton, however, never came up with the other six in time for the exhibition, so Rock simply made them up in Hutton’s style. Many years later a book was written about John Hutton where the author mistook the six muses that Rock had created for Hutton’s own work, arguing that the six muses sketch had been mislaid over time! At the opening of the exhibition, however, there was a lot of embarrassment as Hutton had motioned Rock into a group and introduced him to his model Marigold, whom Rock had only met in her dressing gown when he collected Hutton’s sketches. After a few seconds of confusion Rock said “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on!” Exhibited: John Hutton New Zealand Tour, National Art Gallery, Wellington, et al, 1972, cat no. 2.

First edition. One of the first French painting manuals, often cited as containing the first engravings of the artist’s palette. The twenty numbered plates are those by Corneille referred to on the title while the thirty unnumbered plates are the etchings by Sébastien Leclerc, with their own title-page directly after the text: Figures d’academie pour aprendre; désiner, gravées par Sebastien LeClerc (A Paris Chez N. Langlois, rue St. Jacques; la Victoire).
Neither set of plates was invariably included and the latter plates are preceded by Jombert’s 1751 title-page, as in several other copies, suggesting Les premiers Élemens de la peinture pratique was reissued in the eighteenth century, using original copies/sheets and adding a further suite of plates.
Cicognara, 314: ‘Libretto piuttosto raro e succinto che ha qualche merito per la succosa con cui è scritto: ma si estende presso ché esclusivamente sui preparativi meccanici dell’arte della pittura e le tavole sono inserte fra il testo dell’opera.’

First edition. One of 300 copies. Charles Martin (1884-1934) created this account of the Western Front in blank verse and graphic illustration, disguising its anti-militaristic sentiment under the title Sous les Pots de Fleurs, evidently to tease the censors who may or may not have seen the play on words (it might better read Sous le Flots de Peur, ‘Under waves of fear’). Martin’s art deco style was already well developed in his colourful pre-war contributions to the Gazette de Bon Ton, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, but here, working under frightening conditions, his tone is understandably darker. Like several other artists, he served as a camouflage officer, a serjeant in the ‘section de camouflage’, stationed at Bergues. Carteret, Modernes, V, p. 133.

A substantial collection of plates depicting upholstered chairs, sofas, stools and other seats, evidently a maker’s or vendor’s collection with additional tracings and drawings. Most are taken from the bimonthly journal Le Garde-meuble ancien et moderne with others from L’ameublement, Le Magasin de meuble and Le Moniteur de l’ameublement and they include a range of Second Empire styles together with fashionable reproductions of earlier styles. Carved wood (varnished, lacquered, gilt or ‘exotype’) is usually paired with elaborate upholstery in decorative fabrics trimmed with passmenterie. Makers and suppliers are often mentioned.

A physionotrace portrait of General Samuel Smith (1752-1839), American Senator and Representative from Maryland and an original member of the Society of the Cincinatti in 1783.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes).

Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson. An original portrait, together with the copper plate and twelve impressions cost $25 for gentlemen, $35 for ladies, presumably because of the more elaborate details of hair, though many male sitters (including Smith) sported elaborate braids.

Number 104 of 150 numbered copies of this facsimile edition of Estève’s remarkable, near-miniature wartime sketchbook (1939-1940), with introductory booklet by Françoise Chapon. Estève (1904-2001) was essentially self-taught, working under the clear influence of Cézanne and Braque, and hovering between representation and abstraction. His wartime notebook is a truly exceptional representation of a French soldier’s experience, superbly reproduced here by Éditions des Cendres.

A superb survey of turn-of-the century British domestic architecture by an important French photographer who used cyanotype to notable effect. These examples of seaside ‘cottages’ in East Kent and Sussex depicts an array of then recently constructed high quality houses, a good number of which survive. Broadly within the Arts and Crafts tradition, the houses fuse a variety of older English vernacular styles with modern innovations, notably in the range of moulded and cut bricks and tiles.

Albert Lévy (1847-1931) was both a pioneering and prolific architectural photographer, unusual for his time in working on both sides of the Atlantic, with studios in Paris and New York. Characteristically, his collections were issued as cyanotypes printed directly from the original glass negatives. His collections included numerous sequences of French, British and American buildings of the Gilded Age, but are now very rare indeed. Jisc locates no UK copies. FirstSearch locates US copies at Columbia, Princeton and Lawrence Technological University only.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘A Winter’s Tale’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘the fairest
flowers o' the season
Are our Carnations and streak’d Gillyflowers’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘As you like it’, Act II, Scene 7:

‘Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly.
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Richard III’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Henry V’, Act I, scene 1:

‘The Strawberry grows underneath the Nettle
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
And so the prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the Summer-Grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Henry V’, Act V, scene 2:

‘The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled Cowslip, Burnet and green Clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness and nothing teems
But hateful Docks, rough Thistles, Kecksies, Burs,
Losing both beauty and utility’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Hamlet’, Act IV, scene 7:

‘There is a Willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of Crow-flowers, Nettles, Daisies, and Long purples’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Primroses illustrating ‘Twelfth Night’, Act 3, scene 1:

‘Cesario, by the Roses of the Spring,
By maidenhood, honour, truth and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph, from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Twelfth Night’, Act I, scene 1:

‘That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of Violets,
Stealing and giving odour!’

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Titus Andronicus’ Act II, Scene 3:

‘The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,
O’ercome with Moss and baleful Mistletoe...
But straight they told me they would bind me here
Unto the body of a dismal Yew,
And leave me to this miserable death’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating Ophelia’s ‘mad speech’ in Hamlet:

‘There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love,
remember. And there is Pansies, that’s for thoughts.
... There’s Fennel for you, and Columbines. There’s Rue for you,
and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your Rue with a difference! There’s a Daisy. I
would give you some Violets, but they wither’d all when my father
died’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph, the title-page from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating roses, honeysuckle and thistles with the quotation:

‘And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (’As You Like It’, Act II, scene 1, the Duke in the Forest of Arden).