[Rarebooks] fa: A GENERAL VIEW OF THE STATE OF PORTUGAL - James Murphy - 1798

[ArCh]

Listed now, auctions ending MONDAY, April 22. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y3tbxvzl

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


James [Cavanah] Murphy: A General View of the State of Portugal; Containing a Topographical Description Thereof. In which are included, an Account of the Physical and Moral State of the Kingdom; Together With Observations on the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Productions of Its Colonies. The Whole compiled from the best Portuguese Writers, and from Notices obtained in the Country. London: Printed for T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies, 1798. First edition. Folio (33 cm) in modern parchment-backed marbled boards; xi, [1], 272 pp.; with a folding engraved map and 2 (of 15) engraved plates. ESTC N1850.

With the folding map present, but lacking all but two of the plates ("Interior View of a Portuguese Apartment" and "A View of the City and University of Coimbra"). Various degrees of damp-staining to the upper margin of the text block, most noticeable on the plates and title-page,  less noticeable on the later leaves and map; occasional light spotting and touches of soiling, a few leaves browned, else clean and sound, and firmly bound in a modern binding that seems to have had a light brown wash applied, presumably to give it more of an "antique" flavor.

One of the most important — and uncommon — English-language works of the period on Portugal, and published at a pivotal moment, as the country was soon to play a vital role in the Napoleonic Wars. James Cavanah Murphy (1760) was an Irish architect and architectural draughtsman who took to travel writing, especially of works related to the Iberian peninsula, after being dispatched to Portugal in 1788 to study and record the Dominican church and monastery in Oporto. He spent several years in Portugal and later in Spain, studying Moorish architecture, and "acquired a profound knowledge of the Portugueze and Spanish languages, and held for a short time a diplomatic situation of importance" (T. C. Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, 1824).