Advanced search

Art & Architecture

Contact Alex Day or Andrea Mazzocchi

Art & Architecture encompasses a broad sweep of material, from early works concerning architecture and architectural history, and books and manuscripts on the fine arts and aesthetics, antiquities and archaeology, to pattern and design books, and private press books and fine bindings. The department also handles original artwork, artistic archives, posters, and propaganda material.

Sort by
Author
Price
Date
Title

  1. COMBE, George.

    Phrenology applied to Painting and Sculpture.

    London, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1855.

    First edition, scarce in commerce. George Combe (1788–1858) was a Scottish lawyer and a leading exponent of phrenology, co-founding in 1820 the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. This is an art historical retrospective using phrenology as the basis for an understanding of beauty and artistic ability,...

    £350

  2. [CORNAND DE LACROZE, Jean, et al.]

    Tract volume of ten pamphlets in French and two in Dutch on the League of Augsburg (July...

    The Netherlands, various publishers, 1686 [and one 1694].

    A fine exchange of rare political propaganda published in the late months of 1686 after the signing of the League of Augsburg and the defeat of the Ottomans at Buda.

    £1200

  3. COX, John Roalfe.

    Horses in Accident and Disease: Notes and Sketches.

    Edinburgh, George Waterston & Sons for David Douglas, 1892.

    First edition of an elegantly illustrated veterinary work. An early advocate of the use of chloroform anaesthetic when operating on horses, J. Roalfe Cox here offers tender line drawings and brief descriptions of twenty-eight equine ailments.

    £70

  4. [CRIMEAN WAR.]

    Les militaires chrétiens a la guerre d’orient. Récompenses annuelles.

    Versailles, Beau jeune, [1856].

    First and only edition, rare, of this unusual cartonnage giftbook history of the Crimean War.

    £375

  5. CROOKES, William, Sir.

    Autograph letter, signed, to Sir John Evans.

    London, 7 Kensington Park Gardens, 26 May 1892.

    The scientist Sir William Crookes writes to congratulate the archaeologist and geologist John Evans on his imminent knighthood: ‘I must take this opportunity – the last perhaps in which I can call you “Mr” – to offer you my sincere congratulations on the honour which I see is to be conferred...

    £250

  6. CUJAS, Jacques.

    Iacobi Cuiacii celeberrimi I. C. recitationes in II. et IV. libros Decretalium. Nunc primum in lucem editae.

    Speyer, Bernhard Albin, 1594.

    First edition of these commentaries on the Decretals of Gregory IX by the famous French jurist Jacques Cujas (1522–1590), printed in Speyer and bound in doeskin.

    £750

  7. [DAMILLANO, Giovanni Francesco.]

    Racconto storico con nuove addizioni dello scoprimento della prodigiosa immagine di Maria Vergine...

    Turin, nella stamperia reale, 1790.

    Much expanded second edition (first 1775) of an account of the rediscovery and subsequent veneration of a fresco of the Virgin and Child unearthed in the ruins of an ancient church dedicated to San Giovanni ad Fontes in the Italian town of Cherasco, in Piedmont, in 1760.

    £650

  8. DAVY, Sir Humphry.

    Autograph letter, signed, to Charles Stuart, 1st Baron Stuart de Rothesay, discussing the unrolling of papyri...

    ‘23 Grosvenor Street London’, 26 May 1821.

    An unpublished letter in which Davy discusses his examination of papyri entrusted to him in Paris by Sir Charles Stuart, then British Ambassador to France.

    £750

  9. DIODORUS Siculus.

    Bibliothecae historicae libri XV. Hoc est, quotquot Graece extant de quadraginta quorum quinque nunc primum Latine...

    Basel, Heinrich Petri, August 1559.

    Important edition, the first to be overseen by Sébastien Castellion, of Diodorus’s influential ‘Historical library’.

    £2500

  10. DODGSON, Campbell (editor).

    Woodcuts of the XV Century in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

    London, British Museum, 1934 [– 1935].

    First edition, scarce, of Dodgson’s authoritative and thoroughly illustrated catalogue of fifteenth-century woodcuts in the British Museum. Published after two decades as Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, the monumental Woodcuts of the XV Century is considerably scarcer than...

    £750

  11. DONI, Antonio Francesco.

    Disegno … partito in piu ragionamenti, ne quali si tratta della scoltura e pittura; de colori, de getti,...

    Venice, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1549.

    First edition of an important art-theoretical text by the polyglot scholar Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574) on the Renaissance concept of disegno in contemporary sculpture and painting, a notable source text for scholars of Michelangelo and his lifelong rival, Baccio Bandinelli.

    £1250

  12. [DOVES PRESS.] 

    Pervigilium Veneris. 

    Hammersmith, ‘printed by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Press,’ 1910. 

    One of 150 copies on paper of the elusive Pervigilium Veneris, a celebration of the spring festival of Venus Genetrix, here in the original Doves Bindery vellum, ‘a triumph of simplicity and restraint’ (Tidcombe). 

    £950

  13. DU BOS, Jean-Baptiste, Abbé.

    Reflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. … Quatriéme [sic] édition revûë,...

    Paris, Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1740.

    Fourth edition, expanded and corrected, of this key work in aesthetic and sentimental theory, with Coleridge family provenance.

    £250

  14. EBERSOLT, Jean.

    Monuments d’architecture byzantine.

    Paris, Les Editions d’Art et d’Histoire, 1934.

    First edition of this classic account of Byzantine architecture, published posthumously in the series Histoire de l’art byzantin under the direction of Charles Diehl.

    £250

  15. [EMBROIDERED BINDING.]

    Etrennes mignonnes, pour l’an de grace de Notre Seigneur M. DCC. LIII. …

    Liège, Everard Kints, [1753].

    A charming almanack for 1753 printed in Liège by Everard Kints – bookseller, printer, and wine merchant – here in a delightful embroidered binding with raised work in silver thread surrounding a skilfully executed floral arrangement.

    £400

  16. ERNST, Max.

    Une semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux. Roman. Premier [– Dernier] cahier …

    Paris, Éditions Jeanne Bucher, 1934.

    First edition, no. 706 of 800 copies on papier Navarre from a total edition of 816, of the most famous of Max Ernst’s Surrealist ‘collage novels’, composed entirely of recomposed images drawn from illustrations to nineteenth-century novels, encyclopaedias, scientific journals, and engravings...

    £4500

  17. EVELYN, John.

    Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions.

    London, John Martyn, 1679.

    Third, enlarged edition of Evelyn’s Sylva, the foundational work of English forestry that remained the standard English treatise on the subject well into the nineteenth century.

    £1500

  18. FARINGTON, Susan Maria (illustrator). 

    The 104th Psalm.  Illustrated by Susan Maria Ffarington.  Worden. 

    London,  Vincent Brooks Day & Son, [c. 1867]. 

    The Faringtons or Ffaringtons were an ancient family of Worden Hall, Leyland, Lancashire, with a substantial family archive.  Susan Maria (1808–1894) edited The Farington Papers for the Chetham Society in 1856, and made other contributions to local history, but this unusual panorama seems to have...

    £650

  19. FREEMAN, Arthur.

    Julia Alpinula, Pseudo-Heroine of Helvetia: How a Forged Renaissance Epitaph Fostered a National Myth.

    London, The Author, 2015.

    Julia Alpinula is a legendary Swiss heroine, whose pathetic fate in AD 69 inspired popular historians, dramatists, artists, and poets – including an infatuated Byron – over a period of more than two hundred years. Her very existence, however, was based entirely on a funerary inscription first published...

    £15

  20. FREEMAN, Arthur.

    Catullus Carmen 17.6 and Other Mysteries. A Study in Editorial Conflict, Eccentricity, Forgery, and Restitution....

    London, The Author, 2020.

    This partly historical, partly philological essay offers a general account of the early preservation, post-medieval recovery, and Renaissance evolution of the text of Catullus, with specific reference to one speculative reading in Carmen 17 (‘De Colonia’), and certain humanist twists and forgeries...

    £15