TROOST, Cornelis.

Tafereelen uit het Burgerlijke Leven van de Hollanders in de Achttiende Eeuw ... Scènes tirées de la Vie Domestique des Hollandais au Dix Huitième Siècle.Amsterdam, Evert Maaskamp, 1811. Oblong Imperial double folio (1mo) (52.5 x 72 cm). With letterpress title-page and annotated table of contents, and 32 engraved plates comprising the artist's self-portrait and 31 large genre scenes (29 x 24 cm to 53 x 39 cm). With the (stamped?) owner's signature of the painter, etcher and lithographer David BLES on the title-page. Contemporary (original publisher's?) half calf, Stormont marbled sides.

(2) ll. & (32) plates. Muller, Historieplaten 3985 & supp. 3985; OCLC WorldCat (1 copy); cf. Atlas van Stolk 3773, 3788, 3800, 3861*, 3861**, 3927 (separate prints: see also drawings 3787, 3790); not in Karlsruher Virt. Kat.; NCC; for the artist see Scheen, pp. 526-527 (and for Bles p. 46); Thieme-Becker XXXIII, pp. 426-427; Wurzbach, p. 721. The extremely rare first and only collected edition of Cornelis Troost's work printed from the original eighteenth-century plates engraved by several artists after Troost’s paintings and drawings. The table of contents (in Dutch and French) gives a brief note on each print, and many include verses (in Dutch and French) in the foot margin. Most are genre scenes showing daily life in Amsterdam. Several depict scenes from late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century comic plays and farces, with an emphasis on courting, love and betrayal: a series of four from David Lingelbach’s 1687 “De Ontdekte Schijndeugd” (False Virtue Discovered); one from Thomas Asselyn’s 1683 “Jan Klaasen, of de Gewaande Dienstmaagd” (Jan Klaasen, or the Pretended Maidservant), in which the leading character disguises himself as a maid to get into his lover’s house; two from Pieter Willem van Haps’s 1705 “Het Verliefde Brechje” (Brechje in Love); and others. A series of large (32 x 47 cm) engravings after Troost’s paintings include in the foot margins the coats of arms of the noblemen who commissioned them. Two of the prints show maps in the background.Cornelis Troost (1697-1750), one of the most important Dutch painters of the eighteenth century, was already celebrated in his own time. He painted and drew the present scenes in the years 1725 to 1750, and they were engraved in the years 1754 to 1764, fifteen by Troost’s own student Pieter Tanjé (1706-1761) and ten by Jacobus Houbraken (1698-1780). Altogether the collection includes 31 of the 46 engravings after Troost listed by Wurzbach (many of those omitted are portraits). It was published by the art dealer Evert Maaskamp, who offered bound copies for 28 guilders (a good month’s wages at the time). The edition was no doubt very small, and many copies were probably broken up to sell the prints separately.Each leaf of the book is a whole sheet of Imperial wove paper. At least in this copy there are two different paper stocks. The two letterpress leaves and 14 plates are on heavy paper with a watermark in the corner, difficult to decipher, but beginning “Imp” for “Imperiaal.” The other 18 plates are on smoother paper watermarked “J. Kool & Co” centred along one long edge. Jan Kool played a central role in the introduction of wove paper among Dutch papermakers when he brought information about its manufacture from England in 1807, and he was selling Imperial wove paper with the present watermark by at least 1815 (Voorn, Papiermolens ... Noord-Holland , pp. 126, 331, 333). If the prints on the Kool stock were printed later than 1811 they cannot be much later, and the same stock is used for the endpapers, so the binding may have been executed for the publisher. Wove paper was much prized for copperplate printing because its smooth surface reveals the finest details in the prints.The title-page bears the (stamped?) owner’s signature of David Bles (1821-1899), painter, etcher and lithographer, and may have provided models for some of the eighteenth-century decor for which his genre pieces are famous. The paper without Kool’s watermark is somewhat foxed and shows some light marginal water stains, reaching the printed image in three prints but remaining unobtrusive. Further in very good condition, with only a couple tears on the edges or along the plate edge, none affecting the printed images. The binding is rubbed and the spine and corners damaged.

• EUR 16,000.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: S2446

• bookseller: Asher Rare Books (Since 1830) (NETHERLANDS)