Lot Details
Lot 153
LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE Contes et nouvelles en vers.
Amsterdam: [i.e., Paris: David jeune], 1762. The Fermiers Généraux edition, with the plates before letters. Two volumes, full red French levant morocco of the period, covers with a triple gilt filled border, spine gilt, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, in a modern cloth slipcase. 7 x 4 3/8 inches (18 x 11 cm); xiv, 268, [2] pp.; viii, 306, [4] pp.; illustrated with two portraits and 80 plates after Eisen, engraved by Aliament, Barquoy, Choffard, Delafosse, Filipart, Lemire, Leveau, de Longueil, together with 4 vignettes and 53 culs-de-lampe by Choffard; and six (of seven possible) rejected plates. Slight rubbing to the extremities of the binding, .
Financed and published by the Compagnie des Fermiers-Generaux, the royal tax gatherers, this edition of La Fontaine's saucy fables has long been esteemed as one of the masterpieces of ancien regime book production. Here it is in its first and rarest issue, with the plates for Le Cas de conscience and Le Diable de Papefiguiere in the decouverte state. The work was described by the Goncourt brothers as "the great monument and triumph of the vignette, which dominates and crowns all the illustrations of the age." The designs of celebrated genre painter Charles Eisen (1720-1778) have secured its place as an acknowledged masterpiece of French rococo book illustration. The work has recently been exhaustively reexamined in David Adams' remarkable Book Illustration, Taxes and Propaganda: the Fermiers-Generaux edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers of 1762, Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, 2006. Ray Art of the French Illustrated Book 26.
Provenance:
Bookplate of M.P. Guy Pellion (lot 335 of his 1882 sale); Fritz Kreisler collection (no bookplate but lot 93 in his 1949 Parke-Bernet sale).
C The Julius and Theodore Cohn Library
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