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

Illustrating ‘The Winter’s Tale’:

‘Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale Primeroses...
... bold oxlips and
The Crown Imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The Flower-de-luce being one’.

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

Illustrating ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Act II, scene 1 (she incorrectly gives ‘scene 2’), Titania’s speech:

The seasons alter; hoary headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the Crimson Rose,
And on old Hyems' chin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet Summer Buds
Is, as in mockery, set.’

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

Honeysuckle illustrating ‘Much ado about Nothing’, Act III, scene 1, in Leonato’s garden:

‘Bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where Honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter, like favourites,
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it.’

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

Lilies and a moss rose, illustrating King John, Act IV, scene 2:

‘But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with Lilies boast,
And with the half-blown Rose’.

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

Illustrating the song from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Act V, scene 2:

‘When Daisies pied and Violets blue
And Ladiesmocks all silver white
And Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight’.

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

Illustrating ‘A Winters Tale’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘Here’s flowers for you!
Hot Lavender, Mints, Savory, Marjoram;
The Marigold, that goes to bed with the sun
And with him rises weeping’.

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

Samphire illustrating ‘King Lear’, Act IV, Scene 6:

‘How dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!’

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

Red and white roses illustrating Henry VI, Part I, Act II, scene 4, Warwick’s speech:

‘This brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night’.

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

Hawthorn and bramble illustrating ‘As you like it’, Act III, scene 1, Rosalind’s speech:

‘There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind’.

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

Briars, furze, gorse and blackthorn illustrating ‘The Tempest’, Act IV, scene 1, Ariel’s speech:

‘So I charm’d their ears
That, calf-like, they my lowing followed through
Tooth’d briers, sharp Furzes, pricking Gorse, and Thorns.’

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

Wild pansy (’Love -in-idleness’) illustrating ‘Midsummer Nights Dream’, Act II, Scene 2, as the basis of the elixir which makes Titania, Oberon’s queen, fall in love with Bottom the ass.

‘Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness’.

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

Oak leaves, acorns and rosehips illustrating ‘Timon of Athens’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots;
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs;
The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips;
The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush
Lays her full mess before you’.

First edition of this translation and with the striking large engraved plates by Lady Diana Beauclerk. The artist was the eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, third duke of Marlborough. ‘Lady Di, as she was familiarly known, grew up at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire... There she enjoyed a happy upbringing, her taste for drawing developing early under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (Oxford DNB). Her second marriage to Topham Beauclerk brought her into the orbit of Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Charles Fox, Edmund Burke, and others. Her work — often in the gothic taste — was admired by Horace Walpole who commissioned seven large panels in black wash illustrating his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, which he hung in a special hexagonal closet at Strawberry Hill (six of them are now at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT). She also produced designs for Josiah Wedgwood.

A RARE COLLECTION PRINTED FROM THE ORIGINAL PLATES ENGRAVED BY A PRODIGIOUSLY TALENTED FEMALE ENGRAVER. ANTOINETTE [OR ANTONIA] STELLA-BAUZONNET (1641-1676) ‘was the youngest daughter of a successful French goldsmith. Despite the restrictions placed on women in art academies at the time, her family’s prominent social status allowed her and her sisters, Françoise and Claudine, to receive private training. Her uncle Jaques Stella, a painter and close friend of Nicolas Poussin, assisted his nieces and nephew in their artwork, inviting them to live in his prestigious lodgings at the Louvre. As the youngest of the children, Antoinette was additionally trained by her older siblings. The family frequently collaborated in painting, engraving, and publishing prints. Remembered for her masterfully executed aquatints and engravings, Stella suffered a tragic fall and died in Paris at the age of 35. One of Stella’s most notable works, The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua, 1675, consists of 33 relief-style engravings on paper depicting crowds of men, women, children, and horses traveling alongside the emperor’ (National Museum of Women in the Arts website).

Stella-Bouzonnet’s plates were prepared after drawings by her father Antoine Stella at Mantua. They were printed first in 1675 and were later purchased and reprinted by Joubert, with Chereau, in 1787 (and probably for some time after). In this copy their imprint line giving the date of the reprint has been erased. Each of the plates has been closely cut and mounted in a large album c. 1800. It is of a type (and condition) suggesting use as an artist’s model book.

Both the 1675 and 1787 editions are rare.

A charming miniature juvenile library, complete with its original glass fronted case.
Cotsen A-50 (wanting the glass front); Bondy, p. 77; Welsh, 2012, 2788, 5569, 6481, 3312 and 5558. In the US, Worldcat lists the Wightman copy at the Morgan Library, the Cotsen copy at Princeton, the Adomeit copy at Indiana together with copies at University of Colorado and Oak Spring.

A RARE ‘PHYSIONOTRACE’ PORTRAIT OF THEODORE SEDGWICK (1746–1813), the American attorney, politician, and jurist who served in elected state government and as a delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. representative, and a senator from Massachusetts. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from June to December 1798. He also served as the fourth speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1802 and served there for the rest of his life. He died at Boston and he is buried at Stockbridge. A portrait by Gilbert Stuart of c. 1808 is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Sedgwick studied theology and law at Yale College and though he did not graduate, he continued in his study under attorney Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington. He played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. As a relatively young lawyer, Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve had pleaded the case of Brom and Bett vs. Ashley (1781), an early ‘freedom suit’, in county court for the slaves Elizabeth Freeman (known as Bett) and Brom. Bett (also known as MumBet)was a black slave who had fled from her master, Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, because of cruel treatment by his wife. Brom joined her in suing for freedom from the Ashleys. The attorneys challenged their enslavement under the new state constitution of 1780, which held that ‘all men are born free and equal.’ The jury agreed and ruled that Bett and Brom were free. The decision was upheld on appeal by the state Supreme Court. She was the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. She marked her freedom by taking the name of Elizabeth Freeman, and chose to work for wages at the Sedgwick household, where she helped rear their several children. She worked there for much of the rest of her life, buying a separate house for her and her daughter after the Sedgwick children were grown. On her death the Sedgwicks buried her at Stockbridge Cemetery in the family plot.

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). The process was introduced to America by Charles Saint-Mémin.

The miniaturist 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.

A DELIGHTFUL BOOK-FORM BOX, complete with gilt spine bands, gilt borders to the sides, four gilt bosses (one on the upper cover apparently missing) and gilt edges. The lid incorporates a mirror and the base a hand coloured print.

First edition of a rare lithographed work, pseudonymously issued, but the artist/author James O’Hara is identified in this copy with a contemporary manuscript key. The album is in the form of a graphic narrative recording a yachting cruise from Ireland to Iceland by a group of friends aboard Captain Henry’s Maroquita (a fine two-masted schooner wrecked in Holyhead harbour in 1860). While the initial scenes depict the voyage out (with predictible sea-sickness) most of the images are Icelandic vignettes, with local characters and landmarks. One shows a member of the party photographing geysers with a tripod camera — surely an early record of photography in Iceland.

The manuscript key identifies the four sailors, ‘Smith, Jones, Robinson and Brown’ as James O’Hara, Captain Sandes, Mr. Lane Fox and Captain Henry, ‘proprietor of the yacht Maroquita’ respectively. The National Library of Ireland copy bears the imprint ‘Wm. Robertson’. WorldCat locates only the copy in the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek, Cologne, which has the imprint of Robertson of Sackville Street, Dublin at the foot of the title-page (where ours is blank). There is also a copy in the National Library Ireland (also with Robertson imprint). No copy found in the National Library of Iceland Catalogue.

Ex libris James Dearden. Folio Society, Collectors Corner, catalogue 2 (1961), item 66 (£2.10).

First published in 1886.