L'Ile d'Elbe. Album recueilli sous la direction de M. Le Prince Anatole Demidoff.

First edition of this remarkable album devoted to the Island of Elba, published in Paris by Dusacq & Cie in 1862 and printed by Lemercier. Large folio, loose sheets: 4 pp. of text comprising the Notice historique et archéologique sur l'Ile d'Elbe, 1 lithographed dedication leaf and 18 lithographed plates, including the title-frontispiece. The views were drawn from nature by André Durand and lithographed with the collaboration of Eugène Cicéri. The Bibliothèque nationale de France likewise records the work as comprising 18 numbered plates, including the frontispiece.

Loose in a full grey cloth portfolio, housed in a modern grey cloth box. Smooth unlettered spine with two tears at head and foot, plain boards, light soiling to the lower board. Some scattered foxing.

André Durand (1807-1867), a Norman painter, draughtsman and lithographer, specialised in the depiction of monuments and historic sites. A pupil of Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois in Rouen, he had already worked for Anatole Demidoff from 1839, when the prince entrusted him with a journey through Russia which resulted in an important series of lithographs. On the title of L'Ile d'Elbe itself, Durand describes himself as a correspondent of the Ministry of Public Instruction for historical works: his landscapes belong as much to the recording of monuments as to the picturesque tradition.

The Elba album belongs to the later phase of this long artistic association. Its views of Portoferraio, Longone, Rio Marina, Marciana Marina, Volterraio and San Martino were drawn from nature and transferred to lithographic stone with the assistance of Eugène Cicéri. Four plates are devoted to the Imperial Villa of San Martino. The series immediately precedes La Toscane, the much larger monumental and picturesque album undertaken under Demidoff's direction and comprising 116 lithographs by Durand: Elba thus appears as the first clearly defined territory in a graphic survey soon to embrace Tuscany as a whole.

The dedication to Anatole Demidoff gives these landscapes a particular resonance. On 15 August 1851 the prince took possession of the San Martino estate, where Napoleon had established his country residence during his stay on Elba in 1814. Demidoff commissioned the Florentine architect Niccolò Matas to build a large gallery below the villa for his collection of Napoleonic relics. The exterior was completed in December 1856 and the building housed the Imperial memorabilia Demidoff had assembled over many years.

The introductory text was written by Louis-Auguste de Sainson, draughtsman to Dumont d'Urville's Astrolabe expedition and a longstanding collaborator in Demidoff's travel projects. His connection with San Martino was direct: the museum catalogue names him, together with Raffet and Matas, among those present when Demidoff formally took possession of the estate on 15 August 1851. Ten years later, his text accompanied Durand's drawings and placed their views within a history of the island - one that extended well beyond Napoleon's brief rule.

The title-frontispiece immediately establishes this broader perspective; Durand frames the title within the massive architecture of a fortified gateway and incorporates the Medici arms, recalling Cosimo I, who in 1548 transformed Portoferraio into a fortified stronghold and renamed it Cosmopoli. Nearly three centuries before Demidoff established his Napoleonic museum at San Martino, Medici power had already profoundly reshaped the island and inscribed its presence in its architecture.

In 1862, Durand was therefore depicting not merely the island of Napoleon's exile, but a territory successively marked by the Medici ambitions of Cosimo I and by the Imperial cult created at San Martino by Demidoff.