Email this lot to a friend

« Email Address (separate multiple emails with a comma)

hide

Lot 122C

translate

email

RISSO, Joseph Antoine (1777-1845) and Pierre Anto

Sign In to see what this sold for

Paris: imprimerie de Mme. Hérissant le doux, 1818[-1820]. Quarto signed in 2s (338 x 252 mm). Half-title, title with wood-engraved arms of the Duchesse de Berry, 2pp. dedication to the Duchesse de Berry. 109 fine stipple-engravedplates printed in colors and finished by hand, with occasional touches of gum arabic, after Poiteau, by V. Bonnefoi, Chailly, Dien, Gabriel, Legrand, T. Susémihl and Texier, plate 15 misnumbered 21. Contemporary light brown calf, the covers with a wide decorative border tooled in golt and blind, the spine in six compartments with raise bands, green morocco lettering-piece in the second compartment, the others with repeat overall tooling, gilt turn-ins, g.e. Condition: some spotting to text, some general overall toning to the plates, with heavier browning or spotting to about six plates, and discoration to the image area of about 24 plates, small tear to lower blank margin of plate numbered 72; binding with repairs to joints and head and foot of spine, joints split, spine rubbed with loss of the majority of the gilding, light rubbing to extremities. Provenance: Lynn Abbott Trust. a very fine monograph on citrus fruit: "le plus riche et le plus bel ornement du globe" (p.3). This is a work that Sacheverell Sitwell, writing in Great Flower Books (1990), rates as highly as anything by Redouté, Prévost or van Spaëndonck. He describes Risso and Poiteau's work in glowing terms as "a Hesperidean holiday among orange and citrus groves, for it contains exquisite drawings of every known variety of orange, lemon, and grape fruit ... fruits that hang from the leaves ... like suns and moons, with every kind of rind, and shaped like gourds or pitchers ... or agian, authentic globes of fire, whether pale, as of moonlight, or red-gold like the sun but half-hidden, as in poetry, in its own green shade. A beautiful and inspiring work...." (p. 22-23) In the charming dedication, the authors offer the work to the Duchesse de Berry as a reminder of the "beau ciel de l'Italie" and the warmer climes that she had foresaken when she married Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry, in 1816 and moved to Paris. Dunthorne 263; cf. Great Flower Books (1990) p.133; Nissen BBI 1640; Oak Spring Pomona 76; Stafleu & Cowan 9248.

Click on thumbnails to see larger images:

View Bloomsbury Auctions next auction.

Similar lots up for auction