The Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Poets, Philosophers, Statesmen, Divines, Painters, Architects, Physicians, and Lawyers, Since the Revival of Art; With their Biographies, Arranged in Chronologica

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[MALKIN, Arthur Thomas.] The Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Poets, Philosophers, Statesmen, Divines, Painters, Architects, Physicians, and Lawyers, Since the Revival of Art; With their Biographies, Arranged in Chronological Order. London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1853. 3 vols. 4to. Full brown morocco, gilt and blind-tooled. Spines gilt with four raised bands and decorated compartments. Gilt dentelles. All edges gilt. Marbled endpapers. Vol. I: viii, 308 pp.; Vol. II: [iv], pp. 309–607; Vol. III: [iv], pp. 608–911. Illustrated throughout with 165 tissue-guarded steel-engraved portrait plates. Second edition (first published in seven volumes by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1833–37; here condensed and reissued in three volumes). The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was one of the great Whig cultural projects of the early Victorian age — an institution founded in 1826 on the conviction that education, broadly and inexpensively disseminated, was the engine of social progress. The Gallery of Portraits , with biographical sketches by Arthur Thomas Malkin, was among its most ambitious publications: a systematic survey of the most distinguished minds of Western civilisation since the Renaissance, each subject presented in a carefully engraved portrait alongside a scholarly biographical account. The 165 steel-engraved plates by Arthur Thomas Malkin are beautifully executed, combining the documentary ambition of an encyclopaedia with the visual quality o

• Binding: Hardcover

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