EGYPT DELINEATED

London: Charles Taylor, 1819. FIRST EDITION. 515 x 350 mm. (20 1/4 x 13 3/4"). vi, 146, [2] pp.
HANDSOME CONTEMPORARY RED STRAIGHT-GRAIN MOROCCO, GILT, covers elaborately framed in gilt and blind, raised bands, spine panels with intricate gilt medallion centerpiece, gilt lettering, heraldic crest of Lyme stamped in gilt at foot of spine, turn-ins framed in gilt and blind, (original?) leather hinges, all edges gilt (very expert joint and corner restoration). With 110 ENGRAVED PLATES of Egyptian places, people, and antiquities, one double-page, seven folding, as called for. A Large Paper Copy. Text in French and English in parallel columns. Front pastedown with armorial bookplate of Lyme (engraved by J. F Badeley and dated 1904) and small library shelf label. ◆Frontispiece portrait and half a dozen other plates somewhat foxed, four folding plates with expert repairs, faint offsetting from engravings, isolated marginal foxing, otherwise fine--quite clean, fresh, and bright internally, with crisp impressions of the engravings and generous margins.

This is the rare oversize first edition of these text excerpts and plates, adapted from Baron Denon's much more costly 1802 edition, "Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, pendant les Campagnes du Général Bonaparte," published in English in 1804 as "Travels in Lower and Upper Egypt during the Campaigns of General Bonaparte." The present work combines the 110 famed engravings from the English printing with descriptions of their subjects, supplied in both French and English. According to Terence M. Russell's "Discovery of Egypt," the French artist, writer, diplomat, and archaeologist Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825) was the chief artistic adviser to then-First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, and "was known as 'Napoleon's eye.'" He had met the future emperor at the salon of future empress Josephine de Beauharnais, and was invited by Napoleon to join the Egypt expeditionary force under General Desaix as an arts and culture observer. He made sketches of the remarkable monuments--sometimes while under enemy fire--as well as of the ports, the cities, the inhabitants, and the art, particularly ancient hieroglyphics. When he published the illustrated account of his journey, Russell tells us, "His insightful and deeply humane volume became an instant bestseller. Hitherto no one had suspected that Egypt's rich and mature civilisation existed. . . . Denon was the first to present to Europe a true and honest image of ancient Egypt and the first European traveller to spend months exploring the desert and recording the monuments he found there." He was "the primary force behind revealing Egypt's civilisation to an astonished Europe." His book helped bring about the Egyptian Revival movement in the decorative arts. Our volume presents his influential plates, considered the highlight of his work, to a wider, international audience. The present copy once resided in the stately library at Lyme Park, the family seat of Thomas Legh, 2nd Baron Newton, where other holdings included the Caxton Missal (1487), the earliest surviving printing of a missal using the Sarum Rite..