Les Contretems en Caricatures

Paris: Gide fils, 1823-24. Scarce Awkward Clashes! Trés Amusant!
Trés Rare Inopportune Social and Personal Events

LAMI, Eugène. Les Contretems en Caricatures. Paris: Gide fils, 1823-24. First and Second Series Complete.

First edition. Oblong octavo (7 5/8 x 10 5/8 in; 195 x 272 mm). Twenty-four hand-colored lithographs printed by Villain. The first two plates only are numbered.

Loose in original boards as issued. The first plate with left-hand lower blank corner of expertly renewed (not affecting image), the second plate with a small area of discoloration in lower left blank margin (from repair to previous plate) and the third plate with two neatly repaired tears in the lower blank margin (not affecting image). Some minor marginal staining otherwise an excellent example of this very rare suite of plates in their original bindings.

Quarter green and quarter dark blue roan over drab boards, each volume with original printed label on front cover. Housed together in a fleece-lined quarter black morocco clamshell case, spine with five raised bands decoratively ruled and lettered in gilt in compartments.

An exceptionally scarce album, with no copies coming to auction within the last thirty-six years, and OCLC /KVK recording only three copies worldwide, at the Morgan Library; Princeton; and University of Miami. We know of only one copy in private hands, which we sold to a client of ours ten years ago.

"This early album of broad caricatures hardly suggests what Lami was to become. Though he took ten of his plates from Rowlandson's Miseries of Human Life [London, 1808], he can hardly be accused of plagiarism, since he transposed the English artist's subjects to French settings, in effect making new creations of them. In plate 23 ["He! bonjour, mon cher Oncle..."] the French officer treading on the gouty toe of his invalid uncle is quite a different figure from the English sea captain of Misery no. 11, while the properties beside the two valetudinarians testify to contrasting national habits. Nonetheless, the powerful influence of the English tradition of caricature on French comic artists of the 1820s could not be more clearly demonstrated than by these two albums. Quite as much as Rowlandson's aquatints, Lami's lithographs require color to be effective" (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book #137).

Eugène Lami (1800-1890). "This elegant and brilliant painter devoted much of his time to lithography between 1817 and 1833. The son of an Empire bureaucrat, [Lami] grew up in Paris. Beginning in 1815, he studied painting with Horace Vernet and afterwards in the studio of Baron Gros...To support himself he made lithographs for several albums, including in 1822 a Collection des uniformes des armées françaises, de 1791 à 1814...Lami paid his first visit to England in 1826, during which he drew the sketches which resulted in his Souvenirs de Londres...under [Henry Monnier's] guidance [he] comprehensively explored London and the countryside. Indeed, Monnier provided more than a third of the twenty-eight designs which make up Lami's finest album, the Voyage en Angleterre. It is here that for the first time Lami struck his distinctive note in lithography. These precise and sparkling plates, which show England in its most attractive aspects, brought the lithographic recording of the passing scene to an unprecedented level of grace and refinement. Lami's Tribulations de gens à équipages of 1827 and Six quartiers de Paris...treat French subjects in the same manner...After Lami gained recognition as a painter, he became a frequenter of the fashionable world, which he rendered with sympathy and brio. His chief albums of this kind are the charming Vie de château, published in two series in 1828 and 1833, and the Quadrille de Marie Stuart" (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, p. 203).

Bobins III, 941; Lemoisne, L'oeuvre d'Eugène Lami, p. 369; Lipperheide 3698; Ray 137; Not in Colas or Hiler.