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A SUPERB RENDERING OF BERNARDIN DE SAINT PIERRE’S TALE OF PAUL ET VIRGINIE ON A FRENCH TOILE FABRIC. The six repeated scenes depict the principal episodes of the Rousseau-inspired story, set among the exotic vegetation of the Île Maurice (then Île de France, now Mauritius). In the first, a letter from Virginie’s European family is brought to her, in the presence of Paul, their respective mothers and two black servants. In the second, the governor of the isle summons Virginie to order her return to Europe, before the horrified Paul and the supplications of their kneeling servant; in the third she leaves the island by night, borne on a litter by four servants. The fourth depicts the tragic climax of her shipwreck, as she attempts to return to Mauritius. Two small secondary scenes are symbolic of the the young couple’s pure and untainted love — braving the storm together under her apron, and Paul weeping over the body of his beloved.

First published in 1788, Paul et Virginie was an immense success partly on account of the rich and visual culture it inspired, encompassing prints, games, ceramics and fabrics. Its abolitionist themes also coincideded with other popular fabric patterns, notable a rendition of the Traite des nègres produced around the same time. Several renderings in toile are known, but this example from the Normandy firm of Goutan around the year 1820 is one of the most impressive. The engraver Toussaint Caron (1790-1832), whose name appears as though carved on a rock in this scene, made several other toile designs around the year 1820 as well as engraved prints on paper.

French toile prints (often referred to generically as ‘Toiles de Jouy’ after the products of the famous factory at Jouy-en-Josas) were one of the great successes of French industrial production, but are often overlooked as examples of popular iconography and of engraved printmaking. This example from Normandy was printed using the mordant technique ― the design printed from large engraved copper plates with an invisible mordant. Once the cloth was dyed, the pink colour adhered only to the mordant-printed areas, being entirely washed away from the remaining blank background. Quand les toiles racontent des histoires. Les Toiles d’ameublement normandes au XIXe siècle [exhibition catakogue] (2007), no. 25.

A POWERFUL RECORD OF THE DESTRUCTION IN PARIS during the Paris siege by the Prussians in 1870 and during the brief era of the Paris Commune and its suppression. The sixty-seven prints show a variety of streets, squares and monuments. Some have captions (within the print) giving locations and Disdéri’s name and they include: Rue de Lille, Place Vendôme, the Tuileries, the Louvre, Rue de Rivoli, Place du Chateau d’Eau, Porte Maillot (chemin de fer de Ceinture), Fort d’Issy, batterie de Chatillon and St Cloud. Two photographs depict the Colonne de Juillet (intact) erected in 1830 to commemorate the 1830 revolution, while two others show the ruins of the Colonne Vendôme, torn down by the Communards in 1871. The three loosely-inserted cabinet photographs are by Émile Robert an include two the same column, with the toppled statue of Napoleon and communards posing nearby.

Disdéri, best known for his popularisation of the carte de visite phenomenon in France, was prominent among the many contemporary photographers who captured the era. They were widely sold, disseminated and collected in the aftermath of the violence.

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.

AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER FROM ELIZABETH BUCKMINSTER DWIGHT SEDGWICK (‘E.B. SEDGWICK’) TO WILLIAM FURNESS OF PHILADELPHIA, IMPLORING HIM TO HELP THE ENGLISH ACTOR AND ABOLITIONIST FANNY KEMBLE (MRS BUTLER), then resident in Philadelphia as her marriage to the notorious philanderer and Georgia slave-owner, Pierce Butler was dissolving. Sedgwick explains Kemble’s parlous situation and the abuse she experienced at Butler’s hands. In just over 1000 words Sedgwick mentions Kemble’s abortive plan to publish her letters on her husband’s plantations, recounts news of Pierce Butler’s serial infidelities, of ‘the brutal manner in which for one year he attempted to crush her spirit’, her attempts at reconciliation for the sake of her children, her desire to not take anything from Butler by way of support and the instigation of the legal proceedings which would eventually lead to the couple’s divorce.

The writer, Elizabeth Sedgwick (1801-1864) of Lenox, was Kemble’s closest confidante, to whom Kemble addressed her famous letters (referred to here) later published as the Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863). The recipient was William Furness (1802-1896), a Transcendentalist (a lifelong friend of Emerson) and a prominent abolitionist. Born in Boston in 1802, Furness graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1823, before becoming minister of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia at the age of 22 in 1825. He was still at Philadelphia when the desperate Fanny Kemble came to the city with her family after a disastrous visit to England in which it became apparent that her marriage to Butler was over. ‘From the time of their return to their country until her arrangement was made since I left Phil[adelphi]a, he had never furnished her with a single cent … she had not a farthing in the world’.

‘In 1838 Fanny with husband and children went to Georgia to spend the winter on their plantations. From apparently knowing nothing of slavery, she was thrown into the thick of the problem. Butler was moderately considerate to his slaves, but nothing could disguise the horrors of a system in which one man lived by owning others, treating them precisely as he fancied in order to get the best investment out of them. Worst of all, Fanny recognized that the considerable wealth the Butlers enjoyed, and to which she owed every mouthful she ate, came from the hated system. As it turned out, she spent less than four months on the plantations, but that was enough to stoke her moral indignation over the atrocities she saw. Once more, as she had done on first going to America, she kept a journal of her experiences, which in 1863 finally saw print as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It is a small masterpiece of generous outrage, arguing from the amply and sympathetically documented details of what she had seen, to generalized indignation that such treatment could be tacitly encouraged by part of a civilized nation. Although it was deliberately not published in the American south, copies soon found their way there and scarcely increased admiration for the meddling of an outsider who expressed herself on what was regarded as an indigenous issue’ (Oxford DNB).

A COACHING ATLAS, IN ITS ORIGINAL TRAVELLING BINDING, providing distances, departure times of coaches and other practical information for the major routes within and around the kingdom of France, allowing the planning of coach journeys from Paris to major destinations such as Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strasbourg, London and between regions, and from Amsterdam to Marseille and Strasbourg to Vienna through France.

Desnos (1725-1805) was a prominent instrument maker and globe maker as well as a prolific cartographer. His Atlas first appeared in 1764 and was several times reprinted, each time with augmentations and modifications. This edition is described as the third on title, but the Atlas had already been published more than three times ― with a prior edition of 1765 also bearing the third edition statement. It is dedicated to astronomer and cartographer César-François Cassini de Thury (1714-1784), who was made director of the Paris Observatory in 1771. The title page describes the atlas ‘Première partie’, since Desnos later issued a volume devoted to foreign roads: Nouvel Itinéraire général comprenant toutes les grandes routes et chemins de communication des provinces de France, des Iles Britanniques, de l'Espagne, du Portugal, de l’Italie, [etc].

A privately-printed transcript of a journal kept by Thomas Fairfax, later 9th Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1762-1846). In 1802, he succeeded his father to the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron after his father’s death. He lived the life of a country squire overseeing his 40,000 acres in Virginia and lived at Belvoir, Ash Grove, and Vaucluse. He was 37 when he made the journey written up in a small notebook still in the possession of the Fairfax family in England. He travelled from Fairfield (Va) by land and water, taking ship from Norfolk to Newport and then continuing by coach making brief descriptions of Providence, Boston, Norwich, New London, New Haven, Fairfield and so on.

A RARE PHOTOGRAPHIC PANORAMA OF CONSTANTINOPLE. Taken from the Serasker or Beyazit Tower beside the Ottoman Ministry of War, the 360-degree panorama first looks north-west to the Süleymaniye mosque an across the Golden Horn, and sweeps clockwise) eastwards, taking in Galata, the Grand Bazaar, the Seraglio, Scutari in the distance on the Asian shore, Hagia Sophia, Sultan Ahmet (Blue) and Beyazit mosques, before returning to the square of Ministry of War and an alternate view of Süleymaniye. Though not signed it is similar to the panoramas issues by Sebah and Joallier in the 1870s and 1880s. Constantiople panoramas are more commonly taken from the Galata tower on the northern shore of the Golden Horn, where as this one looks from the southern shore.

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 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.
fferent portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.

A large broadside advertisement for a French provincial entertainment, purportedly drawn from the worldwide travels of its animateur. ‘M. Saunier, Professeur de Physique, le seul qui a donné ses expériences ans les quatre parties du Monde, (l’Europe, l’Asie, l’Afrique et l’Amérique,) devenu, depuis sa rentrée en France, interprête des Etrangers et Membre de la Société sur la rapport des Découvertes des quatre Nations, donnera demain sa premiere représentation de son Spectacle unique pour l’adresse’.
Saunier’s advertised performance is also notable for a performance on the ‘Harmonica’ – at this date a version of the large ‘Armonica’, consisting of revolving concentric glass bowls, invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761. With its ethereal and unsettling tone, the Armonica was widely manufactured in America and Europe. Working on the principle of vibration caused by rubbing the finger around the rim of a glass vessel, the instrument combined a large number of such vessels on a revolving spindle to form a kind of keyboard capable of playing quite complex pieces as well as creating atmospheric sound effects suitable for the theatre, the opera and travelling shows such as Saunier’s.

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.

A charming book-form trinket box, of unknown manufacture, but with other examples known to have been marketed in London in the late nineteenth-century. The monogram reads ‘M.S.’ (though admittedly it could also be ‘S.M.’) and it has been plausibly suggested that the reference is to Mary Queen of Scots, given the all-over thistle pattern. Mary was executed in 1587 and so it is just possible that these boxes were in some way marketed at the time of the three-hundredth anniversary, though we can do no more than offer this as a suggestion.

An anti-Napoleonic tract, describing the French victories in Italy under Napoleon in 1796, under the figure of the Roman conquest of Greece. Having published more than one such critiques, Barzoni had fled Venice in 1797. First published in 1797 under false imprint, there were numerous editions and issues of I Romani nella Grecia with ‘London’ imprints like this, probably all printed in Venice.

Appended to this copy, probably contemporaneously are four popular patriotic songs or verses of a type which would have circulated semi-clandestinely in manuscripts like these. One is entitledL ‘Alfieri all sua Patria’. This edition not in ESTC, which lists a 1797 edition with the F. Rivington and G. Robinson imprint, and several other editions 1797-9.

First edition of this rare French treatise on the origins, history and functions of a herald. The title bears a woodcut of a herald in a fleur-de-lys tabard, while the arms on the title verso are those of the dedicatee Claude Gouffier and those on the final leaf of author Jean Le Féron (1504-1570) himself. With its Middle Hill boards and pencil markings to the front pastedown this is likely to be from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillips.

A rare ‘physionotrace’ portrait of Hannah Breck (1772-1846, later Mrs James Lloyd). The original charcoal and white chalk drawing from which it was engraved is preserved at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Hannah Breck was daughter of statesman Samuel Breck (1747-1809), and sister to Samuel Breck (1771-1862), a congressman from Pennsylvania. She married James Lloyd (1769-1831), a senator from Massachusetts, and is referred to as Anna or Hannah in various sources. Dexter, The St. Memin Collection of Portraits (New York, 1862), 24; Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, 1994), 83.

First edition in Russian of Beccaria’s Dei Delittie e delle Pene (1764) translated from the French version of Morellot. In his fundamental Enlightenment legal treatise Beccaria opposed the death penalty and ‘maintained that the gravity of the crime should be measured by its injury to society and that the penalty should be related to this’ (Printing and the Mind of Man). It was enthusiastically read (in French) by Catherine the Great while codifying her own celebrated legal manifesto, Nakaz, in which almost a third of the text came directly from Beccaria, alongside major borrowings from Montesquieu’s L’Ésprit des lois. Given Catherine’s intellectual omnipotence it is perhaps unsurprising that no Russian edition of Dei Delittie e delle Pene itself appeared during her reign, even though its spirit imbued her widely disseminated Nakaz — required reading for anyone involved in Russian law and government. Thus Beccaria’s principles came to serve as ideals for future legislators in Russia and were fully incorporated into Russian criminal law by the end of the nineteenth century. The title of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestupléniye i nakazániye, 1866) is only the most prominent emblem of Beccaria’s influence in Russia.

‘The first [Russian] translation of Beccaria came out in 1803. It was done by the poet D. Yazykov from the French translation by Morellet, edited by Roederer in 1797... the translation is one of the best in Russian. It manages to convey not only the ideas of the treatise but also the spirit, the language of Beccaria and his contemporaries. It is dedicated to Alexander I...’ (Cizova).

Dmitry Ivanovich Yazykov (1773-1845), writer, translator, academician and director of the Ministry of Public Education later published a translation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1809–14. Cf. Printing and the Mind of Man 209. Rare: Worldcat lists only the NYPL and Yale copies in anglophone countries. T. Cizova, ‘Beccaria in Russia.’ Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, No. 95 (Jun. 1962), pp. 384-408.

Sole edition of this rare little handbook of ladies’ fashion and deportment. Advertised as a translation from the English, there is no obvious British analogue, though it is an interesting indication of the esteem in which British fashion was held in France at this period. The four plates are especially charming depictions of Austen-era styles. The format is very much that of contemporary almanacs with similar titles, but Le Miroir des Graces appeared only once. WorldCat lists no UK or US copies (copies at BnF, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Kunstbibliothek Berlin only).

First edition of a rare little treatise (’The Unknown Deception’) against the deceptions and immorality of lotteries, then a major part of civic life in Italy. It traces the origins of lotteries in sixteenth century Genoa, from whence it spread to other cities, before explaining the extreme difficulty of winning. After a series of detailed diagrams and tables, there are chapters on the spurious and superstitious tactics employed by hopeful players and on the immorality of the game. WorldCat lists the Illinois copy only.

A satirical song collection, in the form of an almanac, lampooning the new Revolutionary institutions. The frontispiece (here in rare colour-printed state) is probably the first book illustration to depict a yo-yo, a toy which became a craze in France in the 1790s under the name of the émigrette, reflecting its popularity among the French nobility at precisely the time they were forced to flee their country. A 1789 painting of the future King Louis XVII now in the Louvre shows him with a yo-yo, while in a revival of the Mariage de Figaro of 1792 Beaumarchais brings his hero on stage playing with his émigrette.

Several issues are known from 1792. An issue with identical pagination and the same plate but with the imprint ‘chez les libraires royalistes’ is usually cited as the first. In this issue Maradan has put his own name on the title. cf. Martin & Walter, 22975; cf. Cohen-de Ricci, p. 677 (’Frontispice non signé, attribué par Mehl à Debaucourt. Ce frontispice existe en couleurs (avant la lettre) en bistre et à la sanguine’).

An interesting group of receipts for labouring and building work carried up in Cumbria, including Kirkoswald, Dolphenby, Skeugh and other named places. Several are for significant amounts received from Sir Philip Musgrave to Thoams Westmorand who oversaw a variety of works: wall building, making a pump, tiling, flagstones, boarding and cutting spiles. Most are from the eighteenth century.

First editions of two very rare Swedenborgian sermons preached in the New Jerusalem Temple in Cripplegate. Separately issued, they were the first two in a series of 12 published in the same year listed on the advert leaf with details of subscription. On completion, all twelve could also be bought bound up with a general title as Twelve Sermons (also 1796). They are rare both alone and collectively — ESTC lists copies of these first 2 sermons at BL only and copies of the collected Twelve Sermons at: BL, Glasgow, Rylands, Academy of the New Church and Louisiana State University. The printer, Robert Hindmarsh was one of the founders of the Swedenborgian movement and the Church of the New Jerusalem in England. The publication dates of both titles is given as 1796=40, reflecting the Swedenborgian belief that the Last Judgement had occurred in 1757, with 1796 representing the 40th year of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ through divine revelation.

‘Sibly... (1757–1840), Swedenborgian minister and banker, was born at Bristol on 20 August 1757. He was the brother of Ebenezer Sibly (1751–c. 1799), a notable publisher of esoteric lore, and was himself an autodidact and nonconformist, self-taught in the classical and biblical languages, part of the self-taught artisan culture. He specialized in alchemy and astrology, and became for a period a bookseller in Goswell Street, London, specializing in books on the occult, some of which his brother was then publishing. He himself translated two astrological works by Palcidus de Titis... He also served as a shorthand writer... (ODNB).

They are here bound together with three other East London non-conformist sermons:

Joseph Priestley, The present State of Europe compared with antient Prophecies; a Sermon, preached at the Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney, February 28, 1794, being the day appointed for a general fast. By Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F. R. S. &c. with a preface, containing the reasons for the author’s leaving England. London: for J. Johnson, pp. xx, 44, [8] (advert/catalogue for Priestley’s books). First edition.

William Cooper. The Promised Seed. A Sermon, preached to God’s ancient Israel the Jews, at Sion-Chapel, Whitechapel, on Sunday afternoon, August 28, 1796. By William Cooper.... London: Printed for the author; and sold by T. Chapman and J. Matthews, [1796], pp. 38. One of several editions of 1796 and probably the first.

William Cooper. Daniel’s Seventy Weeks. A Sermon, preached at Sion-Chapel, on Sunday Afternoon, September 18, 1796, to the Jews. By William Cooper. Being his second Address to that People. London: Printed and sold by T. Chapman, 1796, pp. 32. One of several editions of 1796 and probably the first.