Holmes, G.W.: [Harding, James Duffield]:

$1,250 · Offered by William Reese Company

LESSONS ON ART, SELECTED AND DRAWN BY G.W. HOLMES. The first American edition, apparently unrecorded, of James Duffield Harding's Lessons on Art, first published in London in 1849, adapted and abridged by George W. Holmes, illustrated with twenty-eight leaves of plates drawn by Holmes and printed by the Scottish-born Philadelphia lithographer Thomas Sinclair. George W. Holmes (ca. 1812–1895) was an Irish-born landscape painter who taught drawing and painting out of his home in Philadelphia. Among his students were some of the leading American artists of the second half of the 19th century, including Thomas Eakins, John McClure Hamilton, James B. Sword, and Harrington Fitzgerald. Holmes was the subject of several photographic portraits by Eakins as well as one of the subjects depicted in Eakins' painting titled The Chess Players. As Holmes explains in the preface to this American edition,"The following condensed copy of Harding's 'Lessons on Art' was at first prepared and intended for the exclusive use of the subscriber's pupils, as he had long needed a really Progressive Drawing-book, and was actually engaged in composing one at the time these Lessons were published. The present work, however, so completely supplied the desideratum, that the subscriber concluded to postpone the further execution of his own plan, and to copy for his classes the Lessons of Mr. Harding. It was therefore not intended at first to publish them, but several friends of extensive experience in teachin

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