The Etchings of Charles Meryon

London: The Studio, 1921. First Edition. Original gilt decorated papered boards with parchment backstrip. Very good. Notable for his skill in rendering architectural detail and moody Parisian scenes, "The Etchings of Charles Meryon" offers a diverse selection of the artist's work. Selected from the holdings of the British Museum by keeper of prints and drawings, Campbell Dodgson M.A., C.B.E.:

'...But nothing I have said yet explains what there is in Meryon that makes him regard him as a great artist... It was the combination, in Meryon, of this high degree of mechanical skill with with a fine instinct for design and a poet's vision which was still more specially his prerogative that places him in a different category from a Lalanne, a Martial-Potémont or an Edwon Edwards. The old streets were not, for him, merely storehouses of picturesque motives, structures composed of walls and porticos, gables and spires, on which the sun arranged at day different patterns of light and shade; they were that, certainly, and his etcher's eye trained to observeniceties of gradation between black and white rather than varieties of actual colour, took full advantage of their hitherto unexplored wealth of suggestion. Leaving all metaphor out of court, his actual eyesight was astonishingly keen; he saw details of architecture with the naked eye which would be revealed to average persons only by telescope.' (C.D.). Quarto, original gilt decorated papered boards with parchment backstrip, 47 tipped plates; some mild scattered foxing, spine moderately browned and a few small marks affect the back board, a very good and handscome copy. Printed by Herbert Reiach in Covent Garden.