The works of William Hogarth

Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London, 1822.

Binding: 50 x 65.5 x 7 cm. Cloth on board, quartered with Morocco, gilt decorative rules, banded spine, two red title labels, some wear. Water-damaged and torn, this volume has been restored and re-bound in the late 1960’s, and is incomplete.

This is the edition of the complete works of William Hogarth produced by James Heath in 1822. Heath had restored the copper plates himself, re-cutting and deepening the lines and stipples, and after this edition, they were unworkable, so these are considered the last genuine ‘original’ prints.

William Hogarth 1697-1764 was the first English artist to win an international reputation. His father had experienced life as a ‘poor scholar’, doing hack work for publishers, running a (failed ) Latin-speaking coffee-house, spent five years in the debtor’s prison, and is thought to have fostered Hogarth’s lifelong distrust of publishers and print-sellers, despite working as an engraver.

In 1728 Hogarth reinvented himself as a painter, with the Beggar’s Opera being his earliest dated painting.  He embarked on painting humorous scenes of everyday life, beginning with A Harlot’s Progress (1731), and created a whole new genre of art, ‘pictorial dramas’ that combined narrative detail with an air of theatricality that fitted with the culture of the time, enabling him to reach a wide public through the means of engraving.

He followed up the success of this series with the eight pictures in A Rake’s Progress (1735), although he delayed the publication of the engravings until after the passing of the Copyright Act of 1735 (known as Hogarth’s Act), which provided him with some protection against pirates. The success of these two great series ensured that he was financially secure at this stage.

He became increasingly bitter at what he felt was his exclusion from high society and the art establishment, and began investigating what art might be about. This resulted in his treatise, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) in which he attempted to define the principles of beauty and grace which he saw as being realised in serpentine lines – which he termed ‘Lines of Beauty’.

The book got a hostile reception from his fellow artists, and became the subject of ridicule. In June 1757 he was appointed Serjeant-Painter to the King, an occasion of immense pride as he had received the stamp of royal approval and a guaranteed income of several hundred pounds a year. Despite this apparent success, he was increasingly falling out of step with the times.

James Heath (1757– 1834) was himself a highly successful English engraver, enjoying royal patronage and an associate engraver of the Royal Academy. His father was a bookbinder, and he was steeped in the book trade, illustrating many books and in 1802 publishing his own six-volume illustrated edition of Shakespeare. He later specialized in producing large plates, and kept a large number of apprentices. The year after this book was published, he retired from his profession and his stock of proofs and other engravings was sold in 1823.

Ceachta Beaga Gaedhilge II

Irish Book Company, Dublin, 1916.

Binding: 13.5 x 20.5 cm. Sewn paperback, 28pp, illustrations by Jack B. Yeats.

Many of the generation involved in the War for Independence, such as the McSwineys in Cork, learned their Irish through this book.

Norma Borthwick (also known as Nora) was a member of the executive of the Gaelic League, and took sides with Peadar Ó Laoghaire against MaNeill and others in the matter of preferring the colloquial dialect of Munster Gaelic over classical Irish. From Scotland, she claimed membership of the clan McDonald of the Isles on her mother’s side, and came to Kiltimagh in 1898 under the auspices of Lottie MacManus, the novelist and local Gaelic league organiser.

She was the director of the Irish Book Company, which produced this book, and so she was probably involved in commissioning the illustrations from Jack B. Yeats – which are not among his finest works, being quite typical of this kind of production.

Pádraic Mac Piarais

Iosagán agus Sgealta Eile

Connradh na Gaedhilge, Dublin (n.d.).

Binding: 10.5 x 16 x 1cm. Paperback, with colour illustrations by Beatrice Elvery.

Patrick Pearse (1879-1916) published Iosagán [Little Jesus] in 1907, and rewrote it as a play in 1910. This story was part of a self-conscious attempt to establish a prose style based in spoken rather than archaic, literary Gaelic, and in it Pearse explores the child’s world. Beatrice Elvery’s (1881-1970) pen and watercolour illustrations reflect the Art Nouveau aesthetic, and are similar in feel to many of Jack B. Yeats’ illustrations of the period. She was an Irish painter and stained-glass artist, and with her husband, Charles Campbell, 2^nd Baron Glenavy, she moved in the highest literary circles including Shaw, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield.

Pádraic Mac Piarais

An Mháthair

W. Tempest, Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 2^nd edn., 1927.

Binding: 12.5 x 18.5 x1 cm. Green paperback, illustrated.

This collection of short stories, some of which had been previously published, was put together by Pearse in November 1915, and published in early 1916. This edition has a vocabulary and added anonymous illustrations which echo the religious sentimentality and deliberate idealisation on Pearse’s stories, which are mostly set in a fictionalised Rosmuc.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham, Heinemann, London. 1911

This is the second edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare illustrated by the great Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939) and contains 40 colour plates and 34 line drawings and is considered one of his masterpieces.

Rackham is perhaps the greatest book illustrator of the early 20th century and is particularly known for his children’s book illustrations.

Don Quixote

Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London. (illustrated by Gustave Doré),1867

Cloth binding, gold lettering

Published in quarto format by Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, London around 1867, this is the second edition Don Quixote, the first in a single volume. The 9.5 pound monster has approximately 750 pages and contains 370 illustrations.

Doré was a prolific illustrator in the latter half of the 19th century. His depictions of the Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors’ ideas of the physical “look” of the two characters.

Histoire de France

Mariette, Rollin, Delespine and Coignard, Paris, Vol. 1, 1729.

Binding: 21 x 26 x 5 cm. Speckled calf, gilded rules, banded spine with gilt tooling almost detached, illustrated, with a full-page frontispiece and fold-out maps.

This revised edition of a book by the French Jesuit Père Gabriel Daniel (1649–1728), first appeared in 1713, and became a major source book for the history of the French monarchy.

The frontispiece was designed bys François Verdier (1651-1730) a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and was engraved either by Simon Thomassin (1638/54?-1733) – or possibly his son Henri Simon Thomassin (1688-1741).

The elder Thomassin was also in the Académie Royale, under the patronage of the finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and an engraver to Louis XIV.  The maps are unsigned, and the book has many fine woodcuts as head and tailpieces. [pics: JM1 075-078]

Histoire du Regne de Louis XIII

Brunel, Amsterdam, Vol. 5, 1703.

Binding: 10 x 16.5 x 4 cm. Calf, banded spine with gilt tooling, worn. Rubricated title page, engraved frontispiece and portraits.

This attractive book is volume 5 of a 12-volume history written by   Michel Le Vassor, (1646–1718), a French Protestant, historian, and critic of Louis XIV.

Through his various writings and membership in the circle of Pierre Jurieu, he underscored the instability in the European state system caused by the trend towards increasing absolutism. Jurieu (1637-1713) was a radical French Protestant leader who dominated many of those who had fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and encouraged William of Orange in his ambitions towards the English throne.

The book is dedicated to Lord Wharton, Comptroller of the Royal Household when William became king of England, and who was to serve as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1708-1710. As Earl of Rathfarnham, Wharton leased the grounds for the first paper mill in Ireland in the early 1690s. The unsigned engravings are very good, and the book is annotated in pencil throughout. [pics: JM2 023-026]

Cours Entier de Philosophie

Huguetan, Amsterdam, Vol. 3, 1691.

Binding: 21 x 25 x 4.5 cm. Calf binding with plain covers and a heavily banded spine with gilt infill decorations and title, illustrated.

This book is impressively designed, with a rubricated and illustrated title page, some woodcut headpieces and relatively modern looking typography. The unsigned illustrations give a great insight into the state of medical knowledge at the time, including investigations into the brain and the science of vision. This book, which strictly follows the ideas of Descartes, was the chief work of Pierre Silvain Regis (1632-1707), a French philosopher and prominent critic of Spinoza, who was subsequently nominated to the French Academy of Sciences in 1699, reflecting the role of ‘natural philosophy’ in the 17^th century.

Poems On Several Occasions

Birt and Feales, London, Vol. 3, 1733.

Binding: 10 x 16.5 x 2 cm. Calf binding, banded spine, decorated with gilt florets and acorns, two coloured title labels, gilt binding edges, red paper edges, illustrated

The unsigned portrait frontispiece is very nice, and, following a life of Prior by Samuel Humphreys, there is a full page engraving, signed by ‘G.V. dr Gucht’. Gerard Van der Gucht (also Vander Gucht or Vandergucht) (1696/7-1776) was a son of the Flemish engraver Michael Vander Gucht (1660-1725).

By adopting the French method of combining precise engraving with etched tones, he became one of the leading engravers in London, concentrating on the book trade.  Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was a diplomat on behalf of William of Orange, rising to become under-secretary of state. His personal loyalties led him to join the Tory side, and he fell out of favour. Thackeray described his work as ‘amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.’