American Yachts, a Series of Water-Color Sketches ... [With:] American yachts: Their clubs and races .. by COZZENS, Frederic S. (1846-1928); and J. D. Jerrold KELLEY (1847-1922) - 1885

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885. 2 volumes, oblong folio (plates) and 8vo (text). [Plates:] Printed on card throughout. Title printed in red and black. 27 mounted chromolithographic plates, paper letterpress title labels mounted on verso as issued (numbered 1-26, plus the "Extra Plate" issued for the 1885 America's Cup). Minor wear at edges and corners of the cards. [Text] Title printed in red and black, half-title. xxi, [1], 451pp., plus 25 plates. Expertly bound to style in half dark blue morocco and marbled paper covered boards, spines with raised bands, lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers Magnificent pictorial record of the golden age of yachting in America and one of the rarest works of American chomolithography. This work covers a period of thirty years from the first "America" race at Cowes, England in 1851, to the 1885 America's Cup. A total of nearly eighty yachts (mostly the cutters and schooners favoured in the 1870s) are depicted in actual races, including the successful defenders Magic (1870), Sappho (1871), Madelaine (1876), and Mischief (1881). Frederic Cozzens was one of America's finest marine artists. Like most great marine artists, he was thoroughly acquainted with ship building and the art of sailing. He is best known for his paintings of great American yachts of the latter half of the 19th century, which were commissioned by many of New York's leading yachtsmen. In 1884, he expanded his audience by making a series of lithographs of his paintings. It was from some of these that Armstrong & Company, among the best chromolithographers of the day, produced the superb chromolithographs of American yachts which comprise this work. The work was published by Scribner's and Sons, limited to 1250 sets and sold strictly by subscription. Contemporary advertisements for the work describe it as "the most attractive work on yachting ever issued." The accompanying text by U.S. Navy Lieutenant James Douglas Jerrold Kelley, which is often lacking from sets, describes each plate. In the Introduction, Kelley writes of the plates: "In these pictures of our pleasure fleet, the portrait of no boat has been printed until all possible means tending to accuracy have been exhausted. Whenever the originals could be found, within the year devoted to this art work, they were carefully painted, both under sail and at anchor; failing this, studies were made of verified photographs and plans, and, in many cases, the finished pictures were submitted to the owners of the boats represented; and when the criticisms were just -- for yachtsmen are not always the keenest critics of their own vessels -- these were accepted and the work revised until it received the imprimatur of those most nearly interested; finally, a number of the plates were exposed in yacht club-rooms, to the frank and solicited judgment of experienced yachtsmen, and the opinions expressed were carefully considered." The work is very rare, with only one other complete set in the auction records for the last thirty years. Not in Reese, Stamped with a National Character. Bennett, p.29; Last, The Color Explosion, pp. 34-35.