First edition, first issue, exhibiting all the bibliographical points recorded by Cohen-de Ricci (nos. 769–772): an engraved frontispiece, three dedication plates, four title ornaments, thirty vignettes and a final tailpiece, together with one hundred and forty full-page illustrations, including the frontispiece, numbered 2 to 140 and distributed 48, 33, 37 and 22 across the four volumes. The illustrations are after designs by Boucher, Eisen, Gravelot, Le Prince, Monnet and Moreau, and engraved by, among others, Baquoy, Basan, Binet, Duclos and de Ghendt. The frontispiece, three of the four title ornaments and the majority of the vignettes are the work of Pierre-Philippe Choffard, while the fourth title ornament and several vignettes were designed by Charles Monnet. Abbé Antoine Banier's French translation, accompanied by his historical commentaries and a Life of Ovid, is printed facing the Latin text. The plates are printed on heavy wove paper, the text on fine wove paper. Complete with the binder's instruction leaf at the end of Volume IV. The title-pages bear the imprints of Delormel (Vol. I, 1767) and Despilly (Vol. IV, 1771), the combination characteristic of the desirable first issue, the date on the fourth volume being one of its principal identifying points.

Contemporary full glazed red morocco, spines with five raised bands, richly gilt in compartments with decorative tools and fleurons. A particularly fresh copy, with only a few occasional spots and light patches of foxing, and a handful of plates very lightly browned. Small perforation and minute split at the upper joint of Volume III.

Armorial bookplate of William Vincens Bouguereau, very probably a grandson of the painter William Bouguereau through his daughter Henriette, together with the visiting card of Baron de Noirmont.

This edition of the Metamorphoses was the result of a collaborative publishing venture led by the engraver Noël Le Mire and the publisher-engraver Pierre-François Basan, who brought together some of the finest Parisian draughtsmen and engravers of the closing years of the reign of Louis XV. Described by Cohen as one of the eighteenth century's "most charmingly illustrated books" and regarded by Gordon N. Ray as one of the supreme achievements of French Rococo book illustration, it continues, through Choffard's contribution to its ornamentation, the artistic spirit of the celebrated Contes of La Fontaine published by the Fermiers Généraux, for which he had engraved the celebrated tailpieces only a few years earlier. The text is accompanied by Abbé Antoine Banier's French translation, together with his historical commentaries extending his own Euhemerist interpretation of classical mythology, while the accompanying Life of Ovid was written by Abbé Claude-Pierre Goujet. The copy also preserves two distinct associations: that of a probable descendant of the painter William Bouguereau and that of Baron de Noirmont, bibliophile and member of the Conseil d'État, reflecting two notable French private libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One of the great monuments of eighteenth-century French illustrated books, preserved here in its desirable first issue in an elegant contemporary red morocco binding, with the armorial bookplate of William Vincens Bouguereau and the visiting card of Baron de Noirmont.