Picturesque Tour of the Seine From Paris to the Sea

London: R. Ackermann, 1821. One of Fifty Large-Paper Copies
With Remarkably Brilliant Impressions of the Plates
That are Greatly Superior to those in the Regular Copies

SAUVAN, Jean-Baptiste-Balthazar. Picturesque Tour of the Seine, From Paris to the Sea. With particulars historical and descriptive... Illustrated with twenty-four highly finished and coloured engravings, from drawings made by A. Pugin and J. Glendall; And accompanied by a Map. London: R. Ackermann, 1821.

First edition. One of Fifty Large-Paper Copies.

Folio (16 3/4 x 13 inches; 425 x 330 mm.). viii, [ii, contents and list of plates], 177, [1 blank] pp. Hand colored vignette title and tailpiece. Hand-Colored map and twenty four hand-colored aquatint plates by D. Havell after A. Pugin and J. Glendall.
Plates and text watermarked 1820.

Bound by [Rivière] for Hatchards ca. 1940 in three-quarter dark green morocco over green cloth boards, ruled in blind. Spine with five raised bands, lettered in gilt in compartments, top edge gilt, others uncut, dark green endpapers.

A fine, fresh and very tall Large-Paper edition of one of the greatest nineteenth-century English color plate books illustrating the scenery along the Seine. Brilliant impressions of the plates, superbly hand-colored. With all six of the original publisher's wrappers bound in at the end.

"The River Seine is well known to form a distinguished feature in the Tour of France, as it winds through and adorns the important province of Normandy, and is the great commercial Channel of the Metropolis of that Kingdom. This River reflects, in its earlier stream, the most striking views of metropolitan grandeur; and, as it proceeds, Nature has been most lavish in beautiful pictures on its banks, and presents, in its course, a succession of objects, whose landscape enrichments are connected with antiquarian circumstances peculiarly interesting to the English Traveller" (prospectus on verso of the wrappers).

The work was issued by Ackermann in six parts, each containing four plates, between January and June 1821. Seven hundred and fifty copies were printed on regular paper, at 14s per part, and fifty large-paper copies (like the present), "taken on Atlas Paper" at 21s per part. "Large-paper copies have remarkably brilliant impressions of the plates and are greatly superior to small-paper copies" (Tooley).

Abbey, Travel 90; Tooley 445; Bobins, Exotic and the Beautiful II: 548.