Nella Venuta in Roma Di Madama Le Comte e dei Signori Watelet E Copette Componimenti Poetici…colle Figure in Rame.
[Rome], s.n. 1764.
Folio (347 x 230 mm.). Etched title (numbered 1), one leaf (two pages) of letterpress explanation in French, and thirty-one plates (numbered 2-32). THIRTY-TWO ETCHED LEAVES (136/40 x 94/100 mm.) — title, Divine Inspiration and eighteen leaves of text — fourteen in whimsical frames of music books, views of Rome, eagles, violins, birds, angels, beehives, Death, painter’s palettes, dragonflies, cocks, classical sculpture, grotesques, the Muses, the Pantheon, incense burners, etc. — by Étienne de Lavallée-Poussin or after him by Hubert Robert, Franz Edmund Weirotter, Louis-Jean-Jacques Durameau and Radel, WATELET’S FULL-FIGURE PORTRAIT OF HIS MISTRESS MARGUERITE LECOMTE AS AN ARTIST, divisional title, and ten scenes from the couple’s idyllic sojourn in Rome after Lavallée by one or another of the four young artists, (nearly all dated Rome 1764).
GILT STRAIGHT-GRAIN PURPLE MOROCCO (Chas. de Samblanx), outer frame ruled, inner frame of rules and rolls of dots and a chain, foliage and dots at the corners, spine and lettering gilt, board edges and turn-ins gilt, all edges gilt.
Is there anything finer than spending the winter in Rome with your married mistress? A sumptuous reception at the Accademia dell’Arcadia where she is inducted and crowned, a visit to the falls at Tivoli, sketching the Colosseum while a young companion reads to her from a uide book, (separate) audiences with the pope…?
ONLY EDITION, THE FOLIO ISSUE, one of a handful known. The “illustrations and sonnets are filled with fantasy” (Hofer).
“The importance of Rome as a crucible for artists and amateurs and as a laboratory for shaping these new forms of sociabilité finds material expression in Nella venuta in Roma di madama le Comte e dei Signor Watelet e Copette, a small volume of prints produced by the young students at the Académie de France in Rome. The book of thirty-two plates was intended to commemorate the stay in Rome of Watelet, Marguerite Le Comte, and the abbé Copette in the winter of 1763-64; it was coordinated by the pensionnaire Étienne de La Vallée-Poussin, who had trained in Pierre’s studio. In addition to etchings by Hubert Robert and Louis-Jean-Jacques Durameau as well as Franz Edmund Weirotter, a young landscape specialist who had accompanied Watelet’s small group in Rome, the collection contains sonnets in Italian verse by Louis de Subleyras, son of the painter and former pensionnaire…the booklet was offered by the students as a token of friendship and esteem…to the couple…and as a commemoration of the resulting friendships, [it] attests to the new companionship between the artist and the amateur that arose during this period” (Guichard).
The plates were scaled for an octavo, the intended format (c. 18/9 cm., as the Rosenwald copies). Some examples were imposed on larger paper as a “quarto” (c. 22/4 cm., as the Essling-New York Public-Spencer copy), and, few indeed, as a folio leaving eighty percent of the leaf blank (34/5 cm., as here). In fine condition, not in the standard bibliographies of Rome.
¶Nella venuta in Roma di madama Le Comte e dei Signori Watelet ed. P. Hofer 5-13; Guichard, “Amateurs and the Culture of Etching” in Artists and Amateurs. Etching in 18th-Century France ed. Stein (2013) 144-6 & illus. p. 136 & figg. 50-51; The Rosenwald Collection 1577; New York Public Library Dictionary Catalog…Spencer Collection I: 456; Ruggieri, Catalogue (29.VI.1885) 548 “octavo printed as a folio…printed in a small number” (tr.); Brunet V: 576 “printed in only a few copies” (tr.; 4to); Cohen & de Ricci, Guide de l'amateur de livres à gravures 960-61 “Rare” (8vo).
Price: $7,800.00