Voyage en Italie en 1822. 30 dessins lithographiés par lui

First edition of this rare portfolio, published in Paris by the artist around 1823, comprising thirty lithographs after drawings made by Jean-Baptiste Isabey during his journey through Italy in 1822. Complete with the table leaf giving the exact titles of all thirty subjects.

Original portfolio of heavy grey-brown paper, the printed upper cover serving as title-page and bearing the address of Isabey’s own studio in the rue des Trois-Frères; with a printed label reading “Œuvre complet” pasted on. A few pale spots of foxing to the table leaf; spine split for about 11 cm at centre; plate 12 with small marginal tears, formerly repaired on the verso; old adhesive traces to the inner joint. An attractive copy preserved in its original state, with full margins.

In 1822, Isabey travelled successively through Rome, Pratolino, Naples, Pisa, Lake Como, Terni, Florence, Venice, Paestum, Ferrara, Terracina, Tivoli, Salerno, Lake Maggiore, Cadenabbia and Parma; the drawings he brought back from this journey, many of them dated, still preserve something of its very rhythm. In Naples, he recorded the crater of Vesuvius on 5 May, after the first eruptive phase of the year, several months before the great eruption of October.

Trained first by François Dumont and then by Jacques-Louis David, Isabey had worked as a portraitist and designer of imperial ceremonies; under the Restoration, he was also among the artists who adopted lithography at an early date in France. The medium was particularly well suited to this kind of journey: the freedom of line, subtlety of tone and lightness of shading allowed him to render with equal ease ancient monuments, lakeside landscapes, Venetian façades and the most spectacular natural phenomena encountered along the way.

Back in Paris, Isabey returned to the views accumulated during the journey and transferred them to lithographic stone; by the following year, they had already been gathered under his name in the portfolio bearing the address of his own studio. Few works preserve so clearly this passage from travel to finished work: scarcely had he returned before Isabey was already publishing the landscapes he had just travelled through.