Oeuvres

Deluxe edition of the Works of Salomon Gessner, published in Paris between 1786 and 1793 in three large quarto volumes, finely printed on wove paper and preserved in handsome uniform contemporary green morocco bindings.

Smooth spines decorated with four gilt cornucopia tools and ornamental rolls, gilt roll borders to the boards, board edges and turn-ins, pink paper pastedowns, all edges gilt. Some rubbing, darker areas to the boards of the second volume, spines uniformly faded, occasional foxing.

The illustration comprises three engraved titles, a portrait, a frontispiece, 72 plates, 4 vignettes and 66 tailpieces, all designed by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier the Elder. The copperplates were entrusted to some twenty engravers, including Alix, Baquoy, Dambrun, Delignon, Gaucher, Giraud the Younger, Godefroy, Halbou, Langlois the Younger, Le Beau, Lépine, Le Villain, de Longueil, Pauquet, Petit, Ponce, Taxier, Thomas, Trière and Viguet.

The earlier plates are numbered and set within broad engraved frames, with captions in the lower margins. The later illustrations instead refer directly to the relevant pages of the text. Several are dated between 1782 and 1792, revealing the scale of a project pursued for almost a decade. The conventional bibliographical collation describes the series as three engraved titles, two frontispieces, 72 full-page plates, four vignettes and 66 tailpieces.

Never before had the pastoral world of Salomon Gessner received such lavish treatment. Under Le Barbier's direction, its shepherds, nymphs, landscapes and scenes of domestic affection leave behind the almost rustic simplicity of the earlier editions and enter the realm of the grand French illustrated book. The full-page plates give each episode the breadth of a history painting, while the vignettes and tailpieces carry foliage, children at play, animals, cupids and pastoral motifs into the very spaces surrounding the text.

Despite its profusion, the programme retains a remarkable unity. Le Barbier arranges bodies, draperies and landscapes with classical clarity, while preserving the tender grace upon which Gessner's European reputation had been founded. The illustrations do not merely accompany the writing: they extend its emotional atmosphere and transform each idyll into a small theatre of happiness, desire or loss.

Born in Zurich in 1730, Salomon Gessner achieved a reputation from the 1750s that rapidly spread beyond the German-speaking world. His Idylls renewed the pastoral mode by partly abandoning its heroic and mythological conventions in favour of familiar nature, unaffected emotion and domestic sensibility, qualities that found an especially enthusiastic audience in France. His poetic prose offered readers the vision of a retreat from society without entirely severing its connection to the moral concerns of the Enlightenment.

His French success also owed much to a distinguished group of translators. Michael Huber and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot contributed to the French versions of Daphnis, the Idylls and The Death of Abel; Jacques-Henri Meister translated the New Idylls, while the Pastorals were rendered by the Abbé Bruté de Loirelle. The presence of Turgot, later Controller-General of Finances under Louis XVI, indicates the place occupied by Gessner in French Enlightenment culture, far beyond the narrower sphere of pastoral literature.

Le Barbier was the true guiding force behind the edition. After spending several years in Switzerland, where he met Gessner, he was admitted as an associate of the Académie royale in 1780 and received as a full member in 1785. A history painter, illustrator and painter to the King, he directed both the artistic and publishing aspects of the undertaking, issued by "the author of the engravings" in association with the widow Hérissant and Barrois l'aîné. The series was therefore begun during the closing years of the Ancien Régime and completed in the midst of the Revolution, when Le Barbier also produced the celebrated allegorical painting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen now in the Musée Carnavalet.

Two letters from Gessner to Le Barbier, printed at the end of the third volume, lend the undertaking an almost personal character. In them, the writer discusses the illustrations prepared for his works and the dedication to the Comtesse de Genlis placed by the artist at the beginning of the first volume. Within the completed book, these letters preserve the author's own response to the images through which his writings would reach a new generation of readers.

More than 140 engraved elements, almost ten years of work and some twenty engravers were required to bring the edition to completion. Le Barbier did not merely illustrate Gessner: he transformed his pastoral world into a monument of French book art.

A very attractive copy on wove paper, preserved in its elegant contemporary green morocco bindings, of one of the most ambitious and appealing French illustrated books of the late eighteenth century.