[Rarebooks] fa: LAVATER'S ESSAYS ON PHYSIOGNOMY - 5 vols 1789-98 - Engravings by BLAKE, FUSELI etc

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed this week, along with several other 18th & 19th-century  
illustrated books, auctions ending Sunday, Jan. 17. Details and images  
can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name  
arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p4340

Happy New Year,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A., CA USA

Johann Caspar Lavater: Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the  
Knowledge and the Love of Mankind... Illustrated by more than Eight  
Hundred Engravings Accurately Copied; And Some Duplicates Added From  
Originals. Executed by, or Under the Inspection of, Thomas Holloway.  
Translated from the French by Henry Hunter, D. D. Minister Of The  
Scots Church, London. London: Printed for John Murray, No. 32, Fleet- 
Street; H. Hunter, D. D. Charles’s-Square; and T. Holloway, No. 11,  
Bache’s-Row, Hoxton, 1789-1798. FIRST EDITION thus. Five volumes,  
large 4tos (34.5 x 29 cm; 13.5 x 11.5 in), bound in early diced calf  
decorated in gilt; illustrated with engraved plates and in-text  
vignettes; half-titles; index, subscription list and directions to  
binder. ESTC T139902.

With 173 plates, complete, as per the directions to the binder (one  
number was inadvertently "passed over", so there was no plate 29  
issued), and hundreds of in-text engraved vignettes. The artists and  
engravers include Henry Fuseli (Lavater's close friend, who supervised  
the project and contributed numerous portraits and scenes), William  
Blake (with several engravings, including the portrait of Democritus,  
after Rubens, above), Benjamin West, Chodowiecki, Holloway,  
Bartolozzi, and, in one instance, James Gillray. Monumental in size  
and scope, sumptuously printed and illustrated, Essays on Physiognomy  
is considered one of the great plate books of the period. A subsequent  
edition was published by Stockdale in 1810, but with inferior versions  
of the plates.

The foundation text of Lavater's pseudo-science in which human  
character is revealed through physical features. Though ultimately  
relegated to the dustheap of quackery, "physiognomy" was wildly  
popular and influential at the time and Lavater one of the most famous  
men in Europe. As The Gentleman's Magazine remarked in 1801: "His  
works... were thought as necessary in every family as even the Bible  
itself. A servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the  
descriptions and engravings of Lavater had been consulted." Even  
thirty years later, Charles Darwin was nearly rejected for the  
expedition of HMS Beagle because the captain "was an ardent disciple  
of Lavater ... and he doubted whether any one with my nose could  
possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage."