Voyage pittoresque dans la Régence d'Alger exécuté en 1833, et lithographié par E. Lessore, & W. Wyld. Dédié à Mr. Horace Vernet

First edition of this important album devoted to Algiers and several towns of the Regency, published in Paris by Charles Motte in 1835. The work comprises 50 lithographs on mounted China paper after drawings by Émile-Aubert Lessore and William Wyld, printed by Charles Motte. It was first issued in five thematic parts devoted to buildings, landscapes, types and scenes, before being gathered into a single volume. Cf. Gérard Sangnier, Bibliothèque algérienne, no. 207; Playfair, 517; Tailliart, 896; Gay, 919; Brunet III, 1018. Not in Blackmer.

Contemporary half green goatskin. Smooth spine decorated with triple gilt rules and blind-stamped ornaments, with gilt friezes at head and foot, the upper one partly rubbed away. Marbled paper boards with some marginal fading. Spine restored. Scattered foxing.

Lessore and Wyld travelled in Algeria in 1833, only three years after the French capture of Algiers. They drew a city whose older structures were still largely intact, before the profound urban transformations that would accompany colonial rule. The fifty plates record streets, interiors, monuments, trades, costumes and scenes of everyday life; alongside Algiers are also views of Bône, Oran, Tlemcen and Mascara.

Lessore, who had trained in part under Ingres, and Wyld, who was associated with Horace Vernet, bring to the series a varied approach centred on close observation of place, combined with a taste for the picturesque. Wyld dedicated the album to Vernet, whom he met again in Algeria and who would later play an important role in his career. The dedication is significant: during the 1830s Vernet became one of the principal painters of the French campaigns in Algeria, helping to establish a military and colonial iconography that Lessore and Wyld approach here in a more picturesque and topographical register.

Tailliart would later praise the plates as “de très belles gravures, très précieuses pour la connaissance du vieil Alger.” Published in 1835 from drawings made two years earlier, the series ranks among the earliest major lithographic collections to record Algiers after 1830.