L'Espagne et le Portugal, ou Mœurs, usages et costumes des habitans de ces royaumes, précédé d'un précis historique

Edition published in Paris by A. Nepveu in 1815, in six small octavo volumes, illustrated with 54 hand-coloured plates depicting twelve views, more than sixty different costumes, monuments and various picturesque scenes, including bullfights, most of them after drawings made in 1809 and 1810. Cf. Colas 439; Lipperheide 1214, the latter reference still requiring direct verification in the printed bibliography; Brunet I, 1226, no. 3; Quérard I, 506. The title itself calls for the 54 plates and records the recent origin of many of their designs.

Contemporary half blond calf, spines with four false bands decorated with triple gilt and black fillets, gilt rolls at head and foot, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, marbled edges. Small abrasions and losses to the paper covering the boards, chiefly along the right-hand edges. The bindings are unsigned but may plausibly be attributed to Thouvenin by comparison with other volumes from the same Sinety library belonging to Nepveu’s series of illustrated travels, one of which bears his signature.

Scattered foxing; a small tear to page 63 of volume V.

Provenance: from the library of the Sinety family, an old Provençal noble family whose status was confirmed in 1708, with their armorial bookplate pasted to the front pastedown of each of the six volumes.

The frontispiece to the first volume immediately places the work within the most recent history of the Iberian Peninsula: it depicts the abdication of Charles IV at Aranjuez on 19 March 1808. The uprising that shook the royal residence from 17 to 19 March resulted in the fall of Godoy and the king’s abdication in favour of his son Ferdinand VII; only a few weeks later, the Abdications of Bayonne enabled Napoleon to place his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne and helped precipitate the Peninsular War.

This political immediacy is not confined to the opening image. It also lies behind a substantial part of the book’s iconography. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Breton de La Martinière (1777-1852) had not himself travelled through Spain and Portugal in preparation for these six volumes. In his preface he explains with unusual candour how he constructed the work from recently published foreign sources:

« Cependant j'ai tâché d'offrir à mes lecteurs quelque chose de neuf, et surtout de n'être point réduit à copier servilement comme tant d'autres compilateurs [...]. Ce sont particulièrement des ouvrages en langues étrangères qui ont servi de base à ma description et au texte explicatif d'estampes jusqu'alors inédites pour la France. Sans négliger le voyage pittoresque de don Antonio Ponz, dont j'ai eu constamment l'original espagnol sous les yeux, j'ai recouru plus particulièrement à deux ouvrages publiés récemment en Angleterre, l'un en 1812, l'autre en 1813. Le texte magnifique de ces ouvrages est enrichi d'un grand nombre d'estampes qui ont été transportées dans le mien. M. Bradford, auteur du plus considérable des deux, étoit attaché en qualité de dessinateur à l'état-major de lord Wellington. L'autre, publié sous ce titre modeste, Costumes of Portugal, est rempli d'observations ingénieuses et piquantes… »

[“I have nevertheless attempted to offer my readers something new, and above all not to be reduced to slavishly copying, as so many other compilers have done [...]. It is principally works in foreign languages that have formed the basis of my description and of the explanatory text accompanying prints hitherto unpublished in France. Without neglecting Don Antonio Ponz’s picturesque journey, whose Spanish original I constantly had before me, I relied more particularly on two works recently published in England, one in 1812 and the other in 1813. The magnificent text of these works is enriched with a large number of prints which have been transferred into my own. Mr Bradford, author of the more substantial of the two, was attached, as a draughtsman, to Lord Wellington’s staff. The other, published under the modest title Costumes of Portugal, is full of ingenious and lively observations…”]

Breton’s description of William Bradford nevertheless requires some qualification. The Reverend William Bradford was not a professional staff draughtsman in Wellington’s headquarters but a brigade chaplain attached to the British expeditionary force. His Sketches of the Country, Character, and Costume, in Portugal and Spain were expressly made “during the campaign, and on the route of the British Army, in 1808 and 1809”. He followed the army through Portugal and northern Spain and took part in the retreat towards Corunna in January 1809. The designs subsequently adapted by Breton therefore originated in direct observation of the Peninsula during the war.

Bradford’s Sketches began to appear in London in parts in 1809-1810 and were subsequently reissued in 1812 and 1813. The large English publication, engraved and coloured from Bradford’s drawings, combined landscape views, popular types, civil and military costumes, and scenes encountered along the route of the British forces. Breton makes no attempt to conceal his debt: he himself states that the English prints had been “transportées” - transferred - into his own work.

The word is particularly apt. In passing from London to Paris the images changed format, audience and function. Large English compositions born in the context of a military campaign were reduced and adapted to Nepveu’s small-format volumes; detached from the immediate narrative of an army on the march, they became part of a broad survey of the manners, landscapes, costumes and monuments of the Iberian Peninsula. What had begun in part as visual testimony to war was transformed within a few years into a picturesque journey for the French reader of the Restoration.

The second English work cited by Breton belongs more directly to the tradition of costume and ethnographic illustration. It can be identified as Henri L’Évêque’s Costume of Portugal, or Portuguese Costumes, published in London around 1814 with 50 coloured engravings. Here again Breton drew upon very recent foreign iconography to construct the Portuguese section of his own work.

To these English sources he added Antonio Ponz’s Viage de España, whose Spanish original he states that he kept constantly before him. Breton’s method was therefore not based on any claim to eyewitness travel, but on making material that remained difficult for French readers to obtain directly accessible to them: translation, compilation, selection of descriptions and the transfer of images together constitute the editorial method of the work.

That method was entirely in keeping with the publishing programme developed by Antoine Nepveu for his small illustrated travel books. Breton collaborated with him on numerous compilations devoted to China, Russia, Egypt and various European countries and regions. A polyglot, translator and compiler rather than an explorer, he later became a pioneer of French courtroom shorthand and was involved in the foundation of the Gazette des Tribunaux. The Bibliothèque nationale de France records the extensive geographical and historical output he had already produced before this later career.

The six volumes of L’Espagne et le Portugal organise this material into an almost comprehensive progress through the Peninsula. The first contains a historical survey extending from the Carthaginians to Ferdinand VII. The second describes Catalonia and the kingdoms of Valencia, Murcia and Granada; the third the kingdom of Seville, Cádiz, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Andalusia, Galicia and a section on the Jews of Spain; the fourth Asturias, Old Castile, Biscay, Aragon, Navarre and the kingdom of León. The fifth continues León before turning to New Castile and Madrid, Córdoba and Majorca; the sixth is devoted entirely to Portugal.

As the volumes progress, images originating in the years of war are thus absorbed into a broader repertory of regional costumes, monuments, landscapes, popular types and bullfighting scenes. The Spain presented to the French reader in 1815 had already become once again an object of picturesque curiosity, yet part of its visual record still retained the immediate imprint of the campaigns of 1808-1809.

A fine copy, complete with all 54 hand-coloured plates and from the Sinety library, in which images first recorded during the Peninsular War by Bradford, and subsequently published in London, were adapted only a few years later by Breton and Nepveu to form one of the major illustrated surveys of Spain and Portugal offered to French readers during the Restoration.