120 PLATES, ASSEMBLED FROM THE PARTS ISSUE
[BYRON.] FINDEN, Edward.
[Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of Byron.]
[London, John Murray, 1833-4.]
2 vols., 8vo., containing 120 plates (landscape scenes and portraits, mostly by E. Finden, a few by W. Finden or T. Higham), each with a guard; fine impressions, with no foxing, bound in attractive early green pebble-grain morocco, covers gilt with an intricate linear pattern made of small tools, all edges gilt, blue moiré silk endpapers; tipped in at the beginning of volume I is an autograph letter c. 1848, signed by Finden, to the publishers W. & R. Chambers of Edinburgh; bookplates of Charles E. S. Chambers, sold at Sotheby’s 7 May 1914, lot 114.
Finden’s attractive engraved illustrations to the works of Byron, taken after drawings and paintings by Turner, Stanfield, Weston etc, and his portraits of the Romantics after paintings in the Murrays’ collection, were published in parts by John Murray in 1833-4. Here they have been assembled from the parts as a suite of plates without title-pages (the order of parts not preserved but the five engravings per part often found together). Later they would appear with descriptive text by Brockenden in a three-volume collected edition (with the engravings in a very different order). Portraits of ‘Monk’ Lewis, Southey, Coleridge, Clare, Murray, Caroline Lamb, and others. front the second volume here; the other engravings are of European and Middle-Eastern scenes associated with Byron, from Missolonghi to the Palace of Ali Pacha and the Dungeon of Chillon.
The autograph letter tipped in here relates to Finden’s later publication of The Tales and Poems of Lord Byron, with 46 engravings: ‘The present work has cost me great labour and expense, but I think that the Poems I have selected to illustrate are so beautiful as to be worthy of even greater outlay’.
