Souvenirs du camp de Luneville

Paris: Delpech Editeur, 1829. Six Hand-Colored Lithographed Plates Depicting Military Scenes

[LAMI, Eugène, illustrator]. Souvenirs du camp de Luneville. Paris: Delpech Editeur, 1829.

Oblong folio (8 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches; 220 x 298 mm.). Lithographed vignette title-page and six hand-colored lithographed plates. Plates lithographed by Delpech. All plates mounted on guards.

The plates are captioned: "Conversions par Escadrons;" "La Messe;" "Colonne de Carabiniers passant un qué;" "Bivouac sur la lisière d'un bois;" "Une Alerte;" and "Suspension d'Armes."

Mid-twentieth century half blue cloth over marbled boards, front cover and spine with maroon morocco labels lettered in gilt. With the armorial bookplate of the Comte de Bourqueney on front pastedown.

Very scarce with just one copy located by OCLC in libraries and institutions worldwide at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

The Plates:

1. Bivouac sur la lisière d'un bois
2. Conversions par Escadrons
3. Colonne de Carabiniers passant un guel
4. La Messe
5. Une Alerte
6. Suspension d' Armes


"This elegant and brilliant painter [1800-1890] devoted much of his time to lithography between 1817 and 1833. The son of an Empire bureaucrat, [Lami] grew up in Paris. Beginning in 1815, he studied painting with Horace Vernet and afterwards in the studio of Baron Gros...To support himself he made lithographs for several albums, including in 1822 a Collection des uniformes des armées françaises, de 1791 à 1814...Lami paid his first visit to England in 1826, during which he drew the sketches which resulted in his Souvenirs de Londres...under [Henry Monnier's] guidance [he] comprehensively explored London and the countryside. Indeed, Monnier provided more than a third of the twenty-eight designs which make up Lami's finest album, the Voyage en Angleterre. It is here that for the first time Lami struck his distinctive note in lithography. These precise and sparkling plates, which show England in its most attractive aspects, brought the lithographic recording of the passing scene to an unprecedented level of grace and refinement. Lami's Tribulations de gens à équipages of 1827 and Six quartiers de Paris...treat French subjects in the same manner...After Lami gained recognition as a painter, he became a frequenter of the fashionable world, which he rendered with sympathy and brio. His chief albums of this kind are the charming Vie de château, published in two series in 1828 and 1833, and the Quadrille de Marie Stuart" (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, p. 203).

Béraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, IX, p. 37.