Beschreibung:

Album of Manuscripts, Watercolors and Drawings.
Vp: ca. 1820-1828. 4to (252 x 200 mm). Approximately 30 pp. of verse, anecdotes, remembrances of social encounters, etc. in Lady Blessington's hand; a profile of D'Orsay by Aubry and 36 pencil portraits (each 200 x 155 mm). by D'Orsay mounted to leaves of album. Contemporary red half morocco. Condition : some light intermittent foxing; front cover detached with a few leaves becoming disbound, some leaves excised which originally had lithograph portaits mounted. Provenance : Lady Blessington (bookplate and owner's signature, also initialled throughout; Sotheby's London, 24 July 1984, lot 72. "vice is the only impassable gulph in friendship…" an intriguing record of the blessington/d'orsay circle. In what is essentially a collaborative commonplace album, the Comte has sketched in profile sitters such as Thomas Moore the Earl of Blessington, Daniel O'Connell, Alaric Watts, James Millingen, James Alnutt, Theodore Cook Captain Gronow and Colonel "Handsome Jack" Phillipson. A few of the sketches executed in Florence or Rome and dated 1820-28. Two of the sketches herein were reproduced in Michael Sadleir's Blessington-D'Orsay, a Masquerade (1933), and a letter from Sadleir thanking Maggs Bros. for their help in gaining access to the album is laid in. Lady Blessington includes anecdotes, many bon mots and gossip within their circle, some from herself and others which she has merely recorded, (Samuel Rogers remark on the table manners of Lord Lansdowne -" did you ever see a man mangle a Turbot as he did" ," hard-drinking " Capt. Cothier, RN). Her numerous aphorisms include musings by herself and others on Fortune (" the wheel of furtune admits sort of a drag, therefore is its descent as rapid, as it is dangerous ") and Ingratitude (" the coinage with which most people stay famous ").