Antiques Trade Gazette 35


Confessions of a landscape and genre painter…


ILLUSTRATING scenes from Fielding’s Tom Jones, Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse and Les Confessions, an album of 13 coloured mezzotints after George Morland that was issued c.1790 under the name ‘Facetiae’ shows work very different from that generally associated with the artist. Morland is usually categorised as a


landscape and genre painter, and as one whose subjects were often drawn from the stable and tavern – not the intimacies and exertions of the bedchamber. The plates in this rare collection were


Above: one of David Roberts’ preliminary sketches for the paintings that were reproduced as magnificent coloured litho plates in his monumental pictorial record of The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Egypt and Nubia. From a group of 99 of his preparatory sketches sold for $400,000 (£251,320) at Sotheby’s New York. Above left: one of 20 large photographs from Francis Frith’s Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem album of 1858, sold for £280,000 at Bonhams. Left: personal effects from the Howard Carter archive sold for £90,000 by Bonhams.


November 22 last, was a copy bought by John Evelyn in 1645, while at Venice on his Grand Tour. In a binding made for Evelyn and bearing his gilt arms, it sold for a record £3800. In the 1978 Christie’s sale of Evelyn’s library it had sold for £250. At Sotheby’s New York on April


20, a collection of 99 drawings by David Roberts, many of them preparatory for the plates that illustrate his monumental work on The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Egypt and Nubia, brought a bid of $400,000 (£251,320) as part of the Jacques Levy library. Made during his Middle Eastern travels


of 1838-39, the collection comprises 46 sepia or watercolour over pencil drawings, some with tempera highlights, and 53 sepia wash and ink or pencil drawings. They vary in size from a tiny ink study of a stone mountain bridge to two large, double-page views of Jerusalem. A few weeks later, on May 18, the


Christie’s New York sale of the Albert Small library saw a bid of $200,000


(£126,640) on a first edition set of the great printed work itself, that celebrated “apotheosis of the tinted lithograph”, as realised in the original artwork of Roberts and the mastery of lithographer Louis Haghe. Bound as five volumes in period red


morocco gilt, this was an example of the most sought-after issue with all 241 plates finely colour printed, hand finished and mounted on card, though some plates in this set were slightly cockled and a few showed light spotting or marginal dampstaining. Egyptian subjects accounted for


around half of the 56 watercolours by the Vicomte de Beaumont and Amadeo Preziosi in an album sold for $110,000 (£67,375) in the Levy sale at Sotheby’s New York. Both men illustrated travel books in the 19th century, but these were seemingly unpublished views made during a joint trip to the Ottoman world made in 1845. The other views were of Constantinople and the Bosphorus..


most likely engraved by William Ward (his brother-in-law) and John Raphael Smith, with whom he enjoyed both a successful print-making partnership and a rather rakish, dissolute lifestyle. Formerly in the collections of Michel


Simon and Gérard Nordmann, in one of whose ‘Bibliothèque Erotique’ sales of 2006 at Christie’s Paris it made €13,000 (then £9055), this rare and much admired example of 18th century erotica doubled that sum to sell for £18,000 at Christie’s London on June 13. Another ex-Nordmann item seen at


King Street was a very good and very rare copy in re-backed period sprinkled calf of John Cleland’s re-working of his classic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book so explicit that it was immediately banned on publication in 1749. In The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, Cleland attempted to shift the focus away from eroticism and produce something more resembling a novel like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, but this version too was banned under a warrant issued on March 8, 1750. Only two copies of the original first


are noted in ESTC – one in the British Library and another at Harvard – and this is the only recorded copy of the revised version. In the second part of Nordmann’s Paris sale it made €8500 (£5710) and in London this summer sold at £10,000. Copies of the Marquis de Sade’s


Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu (1791) and La nouvelle Justine...suivie de l’histoire de Juliette, sa soeur, the second edition of 1797, were seen in a May 10 sale held by Zisska & Schauer of Munich that included the 934-lot Leonhardt collection of erotica and curiosa. The Leonhart copy of the exceedingly


rare first edition, say the German auctioneers, is the only one known to contain the publisher’s preface and a former American owner, J.B. Rund, supplied photocopies of that leaf for the copy in the British Library.


continued on page 36


Above: a plate from ‘Facetiae’, an album of 13 erotic coloured mezzotints after George Morland, sold for £18,000 at Christie’s on June 13. This one depicts the heroine and her tutor and lover, Saint-Preux, in a scene from Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau’s immensely successful and repeatedly republished novel was admired both for its sentimental drama and its promotion of conjugal fidelity and moral virtues, but here Morland has focused on Julie’s youthful fall from grace.


Bibliophile Sales Monthly Sales held in Godalming


Now Welcoming Consignments


Contact Clive Moss: cmoss@bloomsburyauctions.com


Middleton (Charles) The Architect and Builder’s Miscellany… 8vo, For the Author, 1799. Sold for £670 including buyer’s premium


Baily.- Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, vol.1-68 8vo, 1860-97. Sold for £1,800 including buyer’s premium


Baverstock House, 93 High Street, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1AL t +44 (0) 1483 423567 f +44 (0) 1483 426392 godalming@dnfa.com www.dnfa.com/godalming


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