Vases grecs et étrusques

[France], 1840. Album with 25 original pochoirs on thick paper, mounted on cardboard leaves, each separated with thin blank sheets. In contemporary dark blue maroquin with gilt frames and title on the panels and spine. Presentation copy, with an autograph inscription card mounted onto the second front fly leaf "à Monsieur Tiphaine en signe de reconnaissance et d'affection respectueuse. L'auteur artiste Beauvalet de St Victor. Binding with traces of light rubbing. Inside clean. Overall in fine condition.. Album with 25 original pochoirs on thick paper, mounted on cardboard leaves, each separated with thin blank sheets. In contemporary dark blue maroquin with gilt frames and title on the panels and spine. Presentation copy, with an autograph inscription card mounted onto the second front fly leaf "à Monsieur Tiphaine en signe de reconnaissance et d'affection respectueuse. L'auteur artiste Beauvalet de St Victor. ff [1 (title)] 12 [each twice, altogether 24]. A deluxe album of twenty-four exquisitely colored pochoir plates of Greek and Etruscan style vases and vessels by the French artist Beauvalet de Saint-Victor.

Inspired by his travel to Sicily, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum from 1833 to 1836, Beauvalet produced a series of pochoirs, colored stencil illustrations, of Greek vases and Etruscan bronze vessels, party-based upon his drawings of ancient pottery and bronzes, partly copied after D'Hancarville's lavish, hand-colored engravings of vases in the collection of Sir William Hamilton (XX), and partly re-imagined the classical subjects. Beauvalet's fine plates demonstrate his innovative use of stencils and pigments custom formulated to imitate the sheen of metal and glossy ceramics (Lyons, 2013).

Very little is known about the artist who was born in Paris in 1780 and died around 1858. Beauvalet de Saint-Victor described himself as "Peintre Minerologiste breveté" (a patented mineralogist painter) alluding to his inventions of pigments with a uniquely lustrous effect and glossy surface. After a three-year sojourn in Italy, Beauvalet returned to France in 1836 and begun to publish books on artistic techniques and portfolios of various subjects such as calligraphy or Japanese pottery. At the same time he produced a collection of plates of Greek and Etruscan style vases and vessels under the title "Vases grecs et étrusques", which is considered as Beauvalet's most original contribution to, and most inventive application of the pochoir process for printmaking (Lyons, 2013). Beauvalet claimed that his technique is rather original drawing than mechanical reproduction, using an intricate and unique sequence of stencils, colored with the saturated tones and metallic pigments invented by himself.

The plates of Vases grecs et étrusques were issued in fascicles of forty-eight pairs of which one was a terracotta vase and the other is a bronze vessel. Depending on the subscriber and their wallet the number of plates in the albums varied. A copy with ninety-six plates is held at the Getty Research Institute, which (just as other the British Library copy) differs from the present, bearing a variant title page with the date of 1845 indicated, and the plates are numbered in Roman instead of Arabic numerals.

Extremely scarce, we could trace only four copies in institutional holdings with diverse contents, two in the US (Getty Research Institute; Avery Library at Columbia), and two in Europe (BL, UK; BCU Lausanne, Switzerland).