art & architecture

Caroline Naudet (1775-1839), one of the very few female caricaturists of her era, she was the daughter of the caricaturist Thomas-Charles Naudet. She is known as the artist of some 25 separate satirical prints c. 1817-1823. The plate depicts an older well-dressed lady sitting for an urbane looking artist. The caption reads:

‘Une dame de qualite faisant faire son portrait s'efforcait de se retrecir la bouche l'artiste s'en appercut et lui dit pour peu que madame le veuille je n'en ferait pas du tout’ (A lady of quality having her portrait done was trying to narrow her mouth. The artist noticed this and said to her, if Madam would like it, I won’t paint it at all). Benezit III, 347.

First edition, an excellent copy, of one of the earliest of Humphreys’ well known medieval revivalist publications, entirely printed in colour in imitation of illuminated manuscripts. Parables of our Lord was issued both in this elaborate stamped black calf binding and a heavier papier mâché binding. The latter often broke the gutta perca binding of the book, leaving the pages loose. In this calf copy all pages are secure.

The colophon reads: ‘In designing the ornaments to the sacred parables contained in this volume, the illuminator has sought to render them in each instance appropriate. The work of illumination was commenced on the first day of May the year of Our Lord MDCCCXLV and terminated on the tenth day of Febry. MDCCCXLVI. HNH.’ McLean, Victorian Publishers’ Book-bindings in Paper p. 13, 51; McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (2nd ed.) p. 99-103 and 210.

A superb version, with original illustrations, of the parable of the Return of the Prodigal Son, from the Gospel of St Luke. Number 6 of just 25 copies, each with 16 original signed gouaches by Berque, this being copy number VI.

Jean Berque (Reims, 1896 – Paris, 1954), painter and illustrator, was son of a Champagne wine producer. A student of the Nabis, Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, he was one of the first members of the Union Rémoise des Arts Décoratifs and created the Stations of the Cross for the Saint-Nicaise church in Reims. Renowned for his nudes, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne from 1924 to 1928 and at the Salon des Tuileries between 1927 and 1934. He is best known as a book illustrator and collaborated with François-Louis Schmied (whose inspiration is clear in this work), Philippe Gonin and the Gonin brothers, from Lausanne. He illustrated works by André Gide, Pierre Louys, Colette, Montherlant, André Maurois, Paul Claudel, Anna de Noailles and Paul-Jean Toulet, as well as The Song of Songs.

A superb rendition of the temptations familiar to bibliophiles. A collector, seated on the library steps of a well-stocked Parisian book shop is assailed on all sides by monsters and mythical birds and animals offering books in irresistible bindings. This is a characteristic biblio-fantasy by Robida, best known for his futuristic graphic science fictions, such as Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887) and Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890)

Dorbon-Ainé, founded by Louis Dorbon in 1900 was a major Parisian bookshop and publisher, trading in the early twentieth century from the prominent Left Bank location at 53 quai des Grands Augustins. As booksellers, Dorbon specialised in esoteric and occult literature but also published the works of authors such as Xavier Marcel Boulestin, Maurice Des Ombiaux, Claude Farrère, Camille Saint-Saëns, and René Boylesve as well as Jules Lemaître, Claude Debussy, Francis de Miomandre, and the comtesse de Noailles.

An attractive card showing a fashionable young lady browsing a portfolio of lithographs and advertising ‘Lithographie, Autographie, Taille-Douce’. The Rançon firm sold all manner of lithographic supplies, advertising them in the brochure Fabrique spéciale de produits pour la lithographie, autographie, taille-douce (1894) as well as teaching lithography.

A very finely painted devotional miniature with emblems of the Passion and Ressurection: a broken tree (with fire), a flaming heart, discard crowns, rosaries and a cross. In the background are leafy tress and a convent. In the sky is a glowing rebus and a tiny gold butterfly. The text below reads ‘Vuide [sic for ‘vide’] de tout hormis dieu fait son bonheur en ce bas lieu’, the second part of the phrase being rewritten over an erasure. The text, though not identical recalls that of Pascal’s Passion (’Oubli du monde et de tout, hormis Dieu’) — the text recalling his vision of 1654 found sewn into the lining of his coat found on his death.

First edition of a sophisticated manual for young artists, several times reprinted and translated, with first edition very scarce. The largest number of Bouvier’s sequential lessons consider the grinding and mixing of oil colours, with very detailed instructions for proportions of ingredients. The large lithograph plates are equally detailed, showing grinding tools and methods, the ideal colour box, easels, brushes and a well organised palette. Pierre-Louis Bouvier (1765–1836) was one of the most gifted miniaturists of his era. ‘Pierre Louis Bouvier studied under Fabre in Geneva and Vestier in Paris. He established himself in Geneva as a miniaturist, inventing a colour-grinding machine and publishing a Young Artists' and Amateur Painters' Handbook, which became a classic and was translated into German and English. In 1828, Bouvier took over from Reverdin as director of the Geneva École de Figure, a post he held until his death. His best-known works are his portraits of Empress Josephine (private collection), Mme de Staël, Lalime the Engraver, his Self-portrait and his portrait of The Artist's Children (Geneva) and the portrait of John Rocca (Geneva)’ (Benezit).

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.

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).

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.

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). This copy is number 183 of 225 copies. The Middle English text was edited by Arundell del Re, the compositors were F. Young and A.H. Gibbs and 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 Barbier 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 all printed as gravures by Manzi, Joyant and Cie. 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 transcribe it. 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. The text had appeared in English in an edition of 1907 (New York and London, Funk and Wagnalls) together with versions of Engueda-Work’s illustrations.

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 early Enlightenment taste in houses and gardens of both town and country 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 was 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.