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Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard.
Etruskische und Kampanische Vasenbilder des Königlichen Museums zu Berlin.
Berlin: Verlag von G. Reimer, 1843. Imperial folio, 21 x 14.5 inches, contemporary calf
over marbled blue paper boards. Thirty color and five monochrome plates. Library label
of the Duc de Luynes. Text in German. $9000.
First edition of Eduard Gerhard’s massive survey of ancient Etruscan and
Campanian vase paintings in the museums of Berlin, illustrated with thirty
brilliant color lithographs in terracotta, red, and black. Head archaeologist at
the Royal Museum of Berlin, Gerhard was a co-founder of the first international
archaeological society, Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, and a tireless
cataloguer and classifier of antiquities. This volume reproduces scenes found on
ancient vases throughout Italy, featuring the legends of Ariadne, Hercules,
Achilles, Aegisthos, and the Calydonian hunt, among others; particularly moving
is the image of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of the ruins of Troy.
The oversized color plates are sharp and vivid, as though just printed. From
the library of Honoré d’Albert, 8th Duc de Luynes, noted nineteenth-century
French archaeologist and collector of antiquities, who donated his own collection
of ancient vases to the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France.
George Eliot. The Writings of George Eliot.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Twenty-five octavo volumes, contemporary full blue
morocco gilt. Photogravures throughout text, many in color. Autograph letter signed
by George Eliot as M.E. Lewes tipped into Volume I. $7500.
Illustrated large-paper edition of Eliot’s writings, number 10 of 750 copies,
handsomely bound at the Riverside Press. This set includes
Scenes of Clerical Life
,
Adam Bede
,
The Mill on the Floss
,
Silas Marner
,
Romola
,
Daniel Deronda
, and
Middlemarch
, as well as Eliot’s poems, essays, letters, and journals. Tipped into
the first volume is a four-page letter, dated April 1873, written on Eliot’s house
stationery at The Priory, Regent’s Park. Inquiring on behalf of herself and her
longtime companion, George Henry Lewes, Eliot seeks a country house for the
fall: “The search for a house is always a difficulty, the precise thing one needs
seeming of course to be the rarest kind . . .We desire perfect seclusion & yet
nearness to a town—what is our house, in fact, only that our scale would be
much smaller.” The couple would eventually let a house called Blackbrook in
Kent, which despite its idyllic location proved inconvenient. They reluctantly
returned to London in October: “In the country, the days have broad spaces,
and the very stillness seems to give a delightful roominess to the hours.”
A fine set, with a letter on one of the great domestic themes by one of the
great domestic novelists.
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