Bath, illustrated by a series of views, from the drawings of John Claude Nattes; with descriptions to each plate
BATH at its REGENCY FINEST
London: W. Bulmer for William Miller and William Sheppard, 1806. First edition.
Folio (18 7/8” x 13 1/8”, 478mm x 334mm): 3 binder’s blanks, π-2π2 B-D2 χ-11χ2, 3 binder’s blanks [$1 signed]. 32 leaves, pp. [4] (half-title, blank, title, blank) i ii-iii [1] (list of plates) 1-56. [=viii, 56] With 30 hand-colored aquatint-engraved plates, of which 2 (the vignettes to the title-page and to p. 56, often found uncolored) are integral with the text.
Bound in perhaps later XIXc red morocco over red cloth with double gilt fillets. On the spine, five raised bands. Author and title (“NATTES’/ COLOURED/ VIEWS/ OF/ BATH”) gilt to the second panel, number gilt to the tail. Top edge of the text-block gilt. Marbled end-papers.
A little scuffed, with some skinning to the lower edge of the rear board. Mildly evenly tanned throughout, with the odd patch of soiling or foxing. A repaired tear to pl. VIII (Pump Room), and a repair to pp. 33-34 (not affecting the text). Pencil numeration in an old hand to the back of each plate, as well as to p. 55. A large and handsome example.
Bath — Aquae Sulis in the Roman period — along the River Avon has long been a destination for its spa waters. From the XVIIIc, it became fashionable among aristocrats looking to take the waters, and keen for access to its parks and to the surrounding countryside. By the 1770’s Bath became the apogee of Georgian architecture — most famously Robert Adam’s Pulteney Bridge (1774) and the Royal Crescent (completed 1774) — and its picturesque beauty celebrated throughout Britain and Europe. During the Regency of George, Prince of Wales (future George IV) during the incapacitation of his father George III from ca. 1795, Bath ascended to the pinnacle of fashionable society. The novels of Jane Austen — among many others — capture Bath in its heyday.
Like a débutante captured in the year of her coming out, Bath is in the present work depicted in all her finery. John Claude Nattes (ca. 1765–1839) was a pioneer of watercolor in Britain, and became the preferred recorder of landscape, including Lincolnshire (under the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks) and Scotland in the Scotia Depicta of 1804. His Bath, however, is his magnum opus with its 30 aquatints after Nattes by John Hill and Frederick Christian Lewis.
The present example was purchased at the Sotheby’s Amsterdam Maggi-Spaulding sale, 28 November 2005, lot 126. Angèle Maggi-Spaulding (1924–2005), heiress to the German culinary firm Maggi, and her husband William Spaulding Jr. (known as “Stu”, 1914–1961), scion of a prominent Boston family.
Abbey, Scenery 41; Tooley 340.
Item #JLR0812
Price: $20,000