Views in Palestine from the original drawings of Luigi Mayer with an historical and descriptive account of the country and its remarkable places.
Year: 1804
Edition: First edition
Publisher: London; R. Bowyer
Category: The Levant
Modern half morocco, folio, pp. i, (1), 47, 1 (= index of the plates), 2 preliminary and trailing blanks and 24 aquatints, finely coloured by hand. In slipcase. The spine divided by five gilt tooled raised bands into six compartments. All compartments elaborately gilt with the titles in the second compartment. The boards with gilt rulers along the edges of the leather.
A short repaired tear to the upper margin of the title page, two repaired tears to the inner margins of pages 7 and 31 and a very small ( < 1cm) tear at the bottom margin of page 3.
The plates have been neatly trimmed within the plate edges, but are complete with the captions and imprints. They are expertly mounted on modern leaves, sized 463 x 321 mm, within washline borders.
These aquatint plates are finely coloured by hand. A few plates have some very light offsetting from the opposite text page, but the majority is very clean. All plates with vivid and vibrant colours.
Of these 24 plates the plates nr. 11 (“Entrance to the Sepulchres of the Kings of Judah”) and nr. 12 (“Sepulchres of the Kings of Judah”) have been bound in the wrong sequence, while plate nr. 19 (“The principal Street in Bethlehem”) is facing page 43 instead of page 42. All the other plates have been bound in at their proper position.
Luigi (Ludwig) Mayer was an Italian artist who was commissioned by Sir Robert Ainslie to make paintings and drawings in the Ottoman Empire.
Abbey Travel 369, Atabey 788, Prince Ibrahim Hilmy II, p. 26.
Click on a picture to enlarge.
