LA FONTAINE, Jean de; SCHALL, Jean-Frédéric (illus.).

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon. First edition thus, a beautifully illustrated printing of La Fontaine's retelling of Cupid and Psyche's tale. Defer de Maisonneuve was a pioneer in the use of colour stipple-engraving for literary illustration and this is the first of a series of luxurious editions printed in collaboration with the renowned Didot press.The first colour stipple engravings were produced by Enrico Bartolozzi in London in 1765, but hand-colouring remained the preferred method to decorate texts of literature until the 1790s. Defer de Maisonneuve adopted the new technique and improved it, fully exploiting its capacity for nuance to create subtle tonal transitions and variations in colour intensity. The plates here were engraved by Bonnefoy, De Mouchy, and Colibert, after Jean-Frédéric Schall. The first plate is numbered (later state), while the others are unnumbered (first state).Fontaine's story was first printed in 1699.

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