AN INQUIRY INTO THE DOCTRINES OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH, IN EIGHT SERMONS de (FORE-EDGE PAINTINGS). SOAMES, HENRY - 1830

Oxford: Samuel Collingwood, Printer to the University, for C. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1830. FIRST EDITION. 220 x 140 mm. (8 3/4 x 5 1/2"). xxvii, [i], 478 pp.
Very decorative contemporary deep purple straight-grain morocco, covers with a frame of multiple gilt and blind fillets and featuring a dense gilt roll, interlacing at medians, and broad-leaf ornaments, broad raised bands, spine compartments with interlaced lobed ribbons, cornerpieces, and central massed tools, turn-ins gilt-ruled, moiré silk endleaves, all edges gilt, and WITH A VERY PLEASING FORE-EDGE PAINTING OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. Housed in an unusually fine heavily gilt pebble-grain morocco clamshell box in convincing imitation of the present binding. Front pastedown with an armorial bookplate ("Souvenez St. Quentin"), front free endpaper with the morocco bookplate of Lucy Smith (Doheny) Battson. ◆Lower cover with uneven fading, spine darkened (with consequent dulling of gilt), light wear to extremities and joints, otherwise an excellent copy, the once extremely pretty binding still appealing (with glistening gilt on covers), the text very bright, fresh, and clean, and the fore-edge painting perfectly preserved.

This is a volume containing a work of substantial interest in its time, enhanced by a splendid fore-edge painting that reflects the book's content. The well-balanced painting here depicts an imposing Canterbury Cathedral against a richly blue sky with large, billowing gray and white clouds. Pairs of trees flank our view of the town of Canterbury in the proximal foreground, and a small herd of cows is right of center. The distinctive treatment of clouds and pointilistic brush strokes for detail are hallmarks of the style of the very skillfull artist called the "Dover Painter," the name given by Jeff Weber to the artist who produced very high quality painted fore edges in the 1920s and 1930s. He did work for the famous London bookseller Marks & Company, for Dawson's Bookshop in Los Angeles, and for J. W. Robinson Company, the Los Angeles department store. Estelle Doheny (1875-1958), whose library comprised one of the great collections of the 20th century, bought actively from Dawson's, and Weber estimates that approximately half of the very considerable number of especially fine fore-edge paintings in the Doheny collection in Camarillo, California, were done by the Dover Painter. The work of this artist is always excellent, but the present painting takes a place among his best for its multiplicity of detail, its convincing sense of space, and the deftness of its execution. A provincial schoolmaster, rector, and vicar before becoming chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, Henry Soames (1785-1860) authored a number of significant works on ecclesiastical history. Now rarely seen for sale, the present group of sermons was part of the prestigious Bampton Lectures, a series of annual addresses that began in 1780 and that especially in the 19th century occasioned considerable interest and controversy..