The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart [With] The Ruins of Balbec otherwise Huliopolis in Coelosyria

£20,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A Dawkins family copy, rebound with new endpapers, retaining a nineteenth century bookplate of “Henry Dawkins Esq.” a descendant of the collaborator, and extra-illustrated with a copy of James McArdell’s mezzotint portrait of James Dawkins after James Stuart, plus a folded copy of the engraving after G. Hamilton’s famous depiction “James Dawkins and Robert Wood First discovering Sight of Palmyra”. Offered with it, and from the same Dawkins family provenance is the original pencil and pastel portrait by James Stuart (one of only three known portraits by him) from which the mezzotint was taken. It is mounted on a larger piece of paper with the background continued by another hand, seemingly so as to enlarge it for an over-size frame designed to match others in a set. See “The British Art Journal”, vol 8 No 2, 2007 ( https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/8023/James%20Stuart%20Portrait.pdf?sequence=1 ) for a lengthy discussion of this portrait, and its suggestion that the sketch was for an unrealised portrait commissioned by the Society of the Dilletanti. It was offered as lot 2 at Christie’s on Feb 28 1913, when it was bought back by a family member. “The discovery of Palmyra at the end of the seventeenth century resulted eventually in one of the most famous antiquarian publications of the following century, Robert Wood’s Palmyra …one of the most superb examples of contemporary scholarship….with magnificent engravings from drawings by his companion artist, Giovann

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