VERNET, Horace and Carle, and Eugène LAMI.

Collection des ouniformez des armées françaises, de 1791 à 1814. Paris, Gide fils, 1822 [&] Collection raisonnée des uniformes français, de 1814 a 1824. 2e. partie de la collection génerale.

Paris, Anselin et Pochard, 1825. 2 vols, 8vo (265 x 180 mm), pp. [iv], xv, [i, blank], [170], 12, [4], with 100 coloured lithographs; [iv], 6, [76], with 48 coloured lithographs; occasional light spotting; first vol. in contemporary red morocco, the second vol. in contemporary green morocco; extremities a little rubbed but a fine copy. First editions. The first work illustrates and describes the military uniforms of the French army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the second those of the ensuing decade.The excellently executed and striking plates were painted by Carle Vernet and his son, Horace, and lithographed by one of the latter’s former pupils, Lami. They reflect the artists’s experiences of that tumultuous period in France’s history. ‘On the outbreak of the Revolution [Carle’s] sympathies were at first on the side of the people. But flying with his wife and children across the Place du Carrousel on the 10th August, he was wounded by a ball in the hand. This, followed by the loss of a sister upon the scaffold, gave him a shock from which he only recovered upon the establishment of the Directory . . . . Forsaking the classic style he then took to military subjects, and his “Morning of Austerlitz” in 1808 procured him the Legion of Honour’. His son Horace, a painter despite his early desire to join the army, was an ardent Bonapartist, who ‘remained faithful to the Napoleonic tradition after the Restoration, and propagated it by means of sketches, pictures, and lithographs, which had an immense popularity throughout the country’ (Bryan, Bryan’s dictionary of painters and engravers V pp. 290, 291).Colas 2987, 2989; Hiler p. 875; Lipperheide Qk 32, 33.

• GBP 7,500.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: T2708

• librero: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)