A picturesque voyage to India; by the way of China
THE LANGLÈS–DUCHESSE de BERRY–
BORLUUT de NOORTDONCK–JACQUES LEVY COPY
London: Thomas Davison for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme; and William Daniell; 1810. First edition, early issue.
Folio (13 7/8” x 10 3/16”, 351mm x 259mm): 52 leaves, pp. [2] (title, blank), i ii (2pp. introduction), [100] (blank, text following each plate). With 50 hand-colored aquatint-engraved plates.
Bound in contemporary half mottled calf over marbled boards (re-backed and re-cornered), with the monogram of Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry, coronetted gilt to the front board (perhaps slightly later). On the spine, six panels. Title gilt to red calf in the second panel. Brown end-papers. All edges of the text-block glazed.
Re-backed and re-cornered. Rubbed, with patches of wear at the edges. Scattered mild foxing, with some offsetting at the plates and tanning verso. Pl. 17 (“Malaye Proas”) starting from the top. Armorial bookplate of the Biblothèque de Rosny to the front paste-down. Black octagonal bookseller’s ticket of Black, Parry & Kingsbury (7 Leadenhall St.) and a blue-and-white octagonal label completed in ink manuscript “1979.”, both at the upper edge of the front paste-down. Ownership signature of Langlès to the verso of the front free end-paper, with indication of an erasure below (his label?). Gilt black leather bookplate “Du cabinet de M.r Boorlut de Noortdonck” to the rear paste-down.
Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) was a landscape painter and Fellow of the Royal Academy who, unlike many of his peers, content to paint bucolic English views, went on to gain fame for his paintings and prints of subjects further afield. In 1784, The East India Company granted him permission to travel in India and to document his observations. For ten years (1785–1794), he traveled with his nephew William Daniell (1769–1837) through China, and Vietnam (“Cochin-china”), Indonesia and India, capturing their views and experiences. Beginning with the departure of the Indiaman Atlas from Gravesend — rather sardonically the text begins “The situation of Gravesend has little to recommend it to the admirers of picturesque beauty” — the plates continue through Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope, 11 plates of Java, 23 of China (including Macao) and 5 of India.
The Daniells sold oil paintings of their discoveries to fund the Picturesque Voyage, which was originally issued in 10 parts of 5 plates (the watermarks of the present work are 1808, indicating an early issue, bound from parts); the work was issued in an oblong format but here as often was bound vertically. The aquatint plates are after the Daniells’ own drawings, and brought to the public some of the most vivid depictions of the Far East. William is celebrated as one of the great exponents of aquatint — a cousin of etching, but using rosin and varnish to control tonality — in Britain.
The present volume (on unusually large and thick stock) has a distinguished provenance. It was sold at the London bookshop of a pioneering woman bookseller, Hannah Black; she operated out of 7 Leadenhall Street in London from 1808 to 1812. Perhaps she sold it to Louis-Mathieu Langlès (1763–1824), the distinguished French Orientalist. Langlès was Professor of Persian at the Collège de France (his 1811 edition of Chardin’s Voyages remains standard), and the founding director (1795) of the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes, which still operates as l’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO). He also was the consultant specialist in Indian manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which became a major western repository of that material. The volume was lot 2362 in the 24 (and following) March 1825 sale of his library for an astounding 300 francs.
Marie-Caroline (1798–1870) was born a princess of Two Sicilies, and by arrangement married Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry, grandson of Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI and the restored Bourbon king from 1814 to 1824 (with a brief interruption in 1815). Although her husband was assassinated in 1820, her son, Henri, comte de Chambord, was the successor to the Bourbon dynasty as opposed to the Orléanist Louis-Philippe. The volume was lot 1443[1] in the auction of the library of her former home, the Chateau de Rosny, in 28 parts from March to April 1837, garnering in excess of 100,000 francs (the present item 106 of them). The chateau library had a considerable amount of Orientalist material, but the monogram makes clear that the duchesse bought the present volume.
François Xavier Borluut de Noortdonck (1771–1857) was a bibliophile born to one of the great noble houses of Belgium. He studied at the Collège des Nobles at Liège and Douai and spent much of his life traversing Europe and buying heavily at auctions and booksellers alike. The auction of his library from April to July of 1858 — in three volumes plus a price-list — appears not to have included the present volume (despite a robust offering of voyages in Asia).
Jacques Levy (1905–1980) was a steady collector of books from around 1940 until his death, with particular focus on travel and the East. Born in Istanbul, he spent most of his life in New York, where the Central Park West home he shared with his wife, the artist Margot Semac, was entirely subsumed by his book collection. The present volume was lot 84 in the Sotheby’s New York sale of his library, 20 April 2012.
Abbey, Travel 516 (his a later issue); Tooley 173.
[1] The graphite notes to the verso of the front free end-paper suggest it is lot 1405, but that is a different Daniell work.
Item #JLR0626
Price: $24,000