Coup d'œil sur Alexandrebad et Louisebourg dans le cercle du Haut-Mayn en Bavière

Very rare first edition, published in Munich in 1819, illustrated with a frontispiece and five hors-texte lithographic plates by Carl Friedrich Heinzmann, bearing the signature “Carl Heinzmann fec. 1819”. Cf. Quérard, IV, 424; Pfeiffer, 220.

Modern Bradel-style binding in full grey paper-covered boards, smooth spine with longitudinal red morocco lettering-piece. Original plain blue-grey wrappers preserved. Some foxing, lower wrapper soiled.

One of the plates bears a Latin dedication to Maximilian I Joseph, King of Bavaria, celebrated as “father of the fatherland”: “Maximiliano Josepho patri patriae”, accompanied by the date MDCCCXIV.

From the library of the Princes of Starhemberg at Eferding Castle, with a manuscript provenance inscription on the wrapper and a partly faded library stamp. Built up over several generations, the Starhemberg library contained an important collection of French and European books; a substantial part of it was dispersed during the 20th century.

Invented in Munich by Aloys Senefelder from 1796 onwards, lithography remained relatively little used for book illustration during the first decades of its existence. Around 1818-1820, however, the process entered a new phase of European diffusion: Senefelder published his German treatise, the Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey, in 1818, and the first French and English translations appeared the following year. It was precisely in 1819, in the city where the technique itself had been developed, that the present work was published.

Its six lithographs therefore belong to the early period of this new language of printed imagery. As early as 1930, the bookseller Jacques Rosenthal described them as “Incunabeln der Lithographie”, emphasising their early place in the history of the process. Without treating the expression as a strict bibliographical category, it bears witness to the longstanding recognition of the illustrative importance of this book.

The plates depict the spa of Alexandrebad and the rocky landscapes of the nearby Luisenburg in Bavaria's Fichtelgebirge. Their artist, Carl Friedrich Heinzmann (1795-1846), was only twenty-three when he produced them. Initially trained under Johann Baptist Seele and subsequently in Munich under Wilhelm von Kobell, he was then at the very beginning of his career. In 1822 he entered the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Nymphenburg, where he was to distinguish himself particularly as a landscape painter.

These views of 1819 therefore belong to a singular moment, when a young landscape artist was experimenting with a still-new medium only a few years before applying his mastery of landscape to porcelain painting. Lithography, allowing the artist to work directly on the stone with considerable freedom in rendering masses, rocky formations, and tonal values, was particularly well suited to the picturesque scenery of Alexandrebad and the Luisenburg.

The author signs himself here “comte de Lagarde Messence”. He was Auguste Louis Charles de La Garde, also catalogued as La Garde-Chambonas and known under several forms of his name. The Bibliothèque nationale de France specifically cites the Coup d'œil sur Alexandrebad et Louisebourg among the works used to establish his identity. A traveller and memoirist familiar with the courts of Europe, La Garde was later best known for his Souvenirs du Congrès de Vienne, a celebrated account of European society during the Congress of 1814-1815.

Published in Munich in the very year when Senefelder's treatise began carrying lithography beyond Germany to a wider European audience, this small travel book is therefore more than a picturesque account of a Bavarian spa: Carl Heinzmann's six plates capture, at an early stage, the encounter between a young landscape artist and a new process that was soon to transform book illustration throughout the 19th century.