Paris. Hamerton.

High Quality leather binding. Gilt entwined edging on both boards. Front board has a gilt Oxford Local Examinations emblem. Brown title plate with gilt lettering and ornate decoration on the spine. An early Edition of a very lovely & historic book

Excerpt from Paris in Old and Present Times: With Especial Reference to Changes in Its Architecture and Topography It is probable that there is not another city in the whole world that has undergone so many and such great changes as the capital of France. Those of us who have been familiar with Paris since the accession of Louis Napoleon have been eyewitnesses of the last of these, which consisted chiefly in improving the means of communication by opening wide new streets, and in erecting vast numbers of houses of a new type. From the sanitary point of view the change was most desirable and circulation was made incomparably easier; from the artistic point of view there was a balance of loss and gain, as the old streets were not always, or often, worth preserving, while the new ones have always some pretension, at least to taste and elegance, and many new buildings are really good examples of modern intelligence and art. But there is a certain point of view from which this reconstruction of an ancient city was entirely to be regretted. Philip Gilbert Hamerton (10 September 1834 – 4 November 1894) was a British artist, art critic and author. He was a keen advocate of contemporary printmaking and most of his writings concern the graphic arts. He was an important theorist of the English Etching Revival. Hamerton's first literary attempt, a volume of poems, was unsuccessful, leading him to devote himself for a time entirely to landscape painting; he camped out in the Scottish Highlands, where he eventually rented the former island of Inistrynich in Loch Awe, upon which he settled with his wife Eugénie Gindriez, the daughter of a French republican magistrate, in 1858. Discovering after a time that he was more suited to art criticism than painting, he moved to Sens and later to Autun, where he produced his Painter's Camp in the Highlands (1863), which was very successful and prepared the way for his standard work on Etching and Etchers (1866). In the following year he published Contemporary French Painters, and in 1868 a continuation, Painting in France after the Decline of Classicism. He had by now become art critic to the Saturday Review, which necessitated frequent visits to England, forcing him to give it up. He proceeded in 1870 to establish and edit an art journal of his own, The Portfolio, a monthly periodical, each number of which included of a monograph upon some artist or group of artists, often written by him. The journal championed printmaking, especially etching. He selected and wrote the accompanying text for Etchings by French and English Artists (London: Seeley, 1874) which included work by Alphonse Legros and Léon Gaucherel. The discontinuation of his painting gave him time for writing, and he successively produced The Intellectual Life (1873), perhaps the best known and most valuable of his writings; Round my House (1876), notes on French society by a resident; and Modern Frenchmen (1879), admirable short biographies. He also wrote two novels, Wenderholme (1870) and Marmorne (1878). In 1884 Human Intercourse, another volume of essays, was published, and shortly afterwards Hamerton began his autobiography, which he brought down to 1858. In 1882 he issued a finely illustrated work on the technique of the great masters of various arts, under the title of The Graphic Arts, and three years later another splendidly illustrated volume, Landscape, which traces the influence of landscape upon the mind of man. His last books were: Portfolio Papers (1889) and French and English (1889). In 1891 he removed to the neighbourhood of Paris, where he died suddenly in Boulogne-sur-Mer, occupied to the last with his labours on The Portfolio and other writings on art. In 1896 was published Philip Gilbert Hamerton: an Autobiography, 1834–1858; and a Memoir by his wife, 1858–1894. The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of etching as an original form of printmaking during the period approximately from 1850 to 1930. The main centres were France, Britain and the United States, but other countries, such as the Netherlands, also participated. A strong collector's market developed, with the most sought-after artists achieving very high prices. This came to an abrupt end after the 1929 Wall Street crash wrecked what had become a very strong market among collectors, at a time when the typical style of the movement, still based on 19th-century developments, was becoming outdated. According to Bamber Gascoigne, the "most visible characteristic of [the movement]... was an obsession with surface tone", created by deliberately not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. This and other characteristics reflected the influence of Rembrandt, whose reputation had by this point reached its full height. Although some artists owned their own printing presses, the movement created the new figure of the star printer, who worked closely with artists to exploit all the possibilities of the etching technique, with variable inking, surface tone and retroussage, and the use of different papers. Societies and magazines were also important, publishing albums of varied original prints by different artists in fixed editions. The most common subjects were landscapes and townscapes, portraits, and genre scenes of ordinary people. The mythological and historical subjects still very prominent in contemporary painting rarely feature. Etching was the dominant technique, but many plates combined this with drypoint in particular; the basic action of creating the lines on the plate for these was essentially the same as in drawing, and fairly easy for a trained artist to pick up. Sometimes other intaglio printmaking techniques were used: engraving, mezzotint and aquatint, all of which used more specialized actions on the plate. Artists then had to learn the mysteries of "biting" the plate with acid; this was not needed with pure drypoint, which was one of its attractions.