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Copy number one, with twelve original watercolour drawings by George Barbier (including those for the wrappers), a grand papier copy printed on vieux japon, and a double suite of illustrations (on chine and japon, one in colour one in outline). This is the first of the three special tirage de tête copies, each containing one third of the thirty-six original Barbier watercolours, this the primary copy, with cover designs. The total edition was of 1091 copies on various papers.

This is one of Barbier’s last illustrative works – he died in 1932 at the age of 50 and at the height of his celebrity, already recognised as one of the greatest French illustrators of his century and subsequently regarded as a father of the Art Deco movement. Gautier’s orientalist novel provided the perfect inspiration for Barbier’s ambiguously eroticised designs, including one of the most immediately recognisable wrapper designs of the era. His finely-wrought watercolours were reduced in reproduction (though not the signed original of the cover) and they retain pencil notes and guidelines for preparing Eugène Gasperini’s woodblocks.

Barbier’s many jewel-like designs for fashion and the ballet and his book illustrations have long been collectible, of course, and he has more recently been the object of a gradual reclamation as a gay artist (despite an absence of any concrete evidence of his sexuality). It is notable he left so little by way of biographical record, and that he was to some extent overlooked or forgotten in the years following his untimely death, leading some commentators to infer a concealed sexuality. ‘Contributing to his disappearance were his own reticence and a surprising sparseness of biographical information. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family in the provincial town of Nantes, he lived a clearly very different lifestyle in Paris, where he frequented unmistakably, if not exclusively, homosexual circles - he was, for example, an intimate of the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou, who introduced him to Marcel Proust’, Roderick Conway Morris, ‘Forgotten Art of French illustrator George Barbier’, The New York Times, Nov. 14 2008.

Gautier’s Roman de la Momie was first published in 1857 and is a quintessential Orientalist fantasy, striking in recounting the discovery of a fully preserved female pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings by an English and a German Egypotologist. The mummy is identified as a queen, Tahoser, and a combination of hieroglyphics in the chamber and a papyrus scroll reveals her story.

The superb binding is by Cretté (1893-1969), ‘one of the Ecole Estienne’s most brilliant pupils... [who] after graduating joined Marius Michel’s studio, eventually taking over a month before the master’s death in 1925’ (Duncan and de Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding. The French Masterpieces 1880-1940, 1989).

First editions of the complete sale catalogues of Denon’s celebrated collections, a marked-up set from the collection of Frédéric Villot (1809-1875), Louvre conservateur of pictures and an important collector in his own right.
Besides his erotic novella, Point de Lendemain, Denon (diplomat, artist and director of the Musée Napoleon at the Louvre) is primarily remembered for his role in Napoleon’s expeditions of 1798-9 and as author of Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte (1802). Among the most influential and important French collectors, he acquired obsessively but with discrimination, both for Napoleon and himself. His posthumous sales of 1826-7 included over 3000 lots of antiquities, pictures and prints, with eight important Egyptian papyri included in the first sale and his own drawings from the Egypt exhibition in another. The three volumes are very scarce complete and comprise: I. Monuments antiques, historiques, modernes; ouvrages orientale, etc. (ed. L.J.J. Dubois, 1390 lots); II. Tableaux dessins et miniatures (ed. A.N. Perignon, 977 lots); III. Estampes et ouvrages a figures (ed. Duchesne Aîné, 801 lots).