Unique recueil de 38 planches lithographiées

Paris, Teissier et Cie, undated [circa 1868-1870]. Folio, 38 leaves mounted on guards, 32.5 x 49.5 cm.

An exceptionally rare collection, probably unique in this form, comprising thirty-eight proofs and working states of lithographed Masonic plates, most designed to be viewed across a double page. Numbered in red pencil from 1 to 40 in a discontinuous sequence including several bis plates. Caillet and Dorbon describe the Rameau d'or d'Éleusis, to which part of this iconography relates, but record no comparable independent corpus of working plates.

Modern full black cloth, plain spine, printed title label mounted on the front board. Repaired tear in the left margin of plate 10; two marginal corner tears to plate 12, neither affecting the image.

The plates bear the imprint of the Masonic bookseller Teissier et Cie and were lithographed principally by J. Rigal et Cie, with several by A. Appert. Their preparatory nature is visible in the objects themselves: manuscript numbering, bis plates, corrections and, most strikingly, the pencilled instruction "à effacer" ["to be deleted"] on several compositions. The volume is therefore more than a collection of illustrations removed from a published book. It preserves traces of their production, correction and circulation within the workshop.

The opening sheets are dominated by the large allegorical compositions of Charles-Désiré Rambert, several dated 1862. Beraldi specifically records a series for the Rameau d'or d'Éleusis under Rambert's name in that year. Jacques-Étienne Marconis de Nègre's work, first published in 1861, was conceived as a vast synthesis of Masonic history, rites, degrees and symbolism. Its author was the leading exponent of the Rite of Memphis, one of the so-called Egyptian currents of French Freemasonry.

In the published Rameau d'or, the illustrative apparatus was limited to a small group of major symbolic lithographs by Rambert. The present collection opens onto a much wider body of material: alongside compositions directly associated with that undertaking are designs for diplomas, emblems and ornamental borders intended for other Masonic purposes. It thus allows us to pass from the finished book to the stock of images from which a specialist Masonic publisher could draw.

Rambert was particularly suited to such imagery. A draughtsman and lithographer specialising under the Second Empire in allegorical, decorative and visionary compositions, he had developed since the 1840s a visual language in which symbols accumulate within large moral and philosophical scenes. Jean-Alfred Fournier, who knew him, remembered a man "built like Hercules", with a remarkably expressive face and "the eyes of an inspired man", a portrait later recorded by Beraldi.

Alongside these images associated with the Rite of Memphis is a second group more directly connected with the institutional practice of Freemasonry. Several are designs for diplomas intended for the Grand Orient of Haiti, founded in 1824; others refer to Rome or Venezuela. The same Parisian presses were thus producing both Marconis's initiatory imagery and official documents intended to identify, ornament or legitimise brethren and lodges thousands of miles away.

The Teissier firm stood at the centre of this circulation. Charles-Adolphe Teissier, bookseller, publisher and manufacturer and dealer in Masonic regalia, was himself an officer of the Grand Orient de France. After his death in 1863 the business continued under the name Teissier et Compagnie. Some sheets still bear the address 37 rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, while others give 37 rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. The street was officially renamed on 2 April 1868.

The coexistence of these addresses helps explain the formation of the collection. Individual compositions may have been drawn and lithographed at different moments, some as early as 1862, before being retained, altered, corrected or reprinted after 1868. The later address therefore does not necessarily date the invention of the image itself: rather, it reveals the length of time for which it remained active within Teissier's stock. The present volume appears to have been assembled from this material towards the end of the 1860s.

This is precisely where its significance lies. The pencilled instructions, changing addresses, bis plates and combination of subjects never issued together in this form allow us to observe not merely finished Masonic iconography, but its manufacture. Between an allegory for the Rameau d'or and a diploma intended for a Haitian lodge, the same Paris workshop was circulating a vocabulary of signs, ornaments and symbols.

A remarkable workshop document relating to Masonic imagery under the Second Empire, probably unique in this form. These thirty-eight proofs reveal, behind the published book and the completed diploma, the working life of the image itself: drawn by Rambert, lithographed, corrected, reused and finally sent from Teissier's Paris premises to lodges in Haiti, Rome and Venezuela.