THE DANCE OF DEATH
HOLBEIN, Hans; Wenceslaus HOLLAR, engraver; [Francis DOUCE, editor].
The Dance of Death, from the original Designs of Hans Holbein, illustrated with thirty-three Plates, engraved by W. Hollar, with Descriptions in English and French. London, [B. McMillan] for J. Coxhead, 1816.
[McMillan] for J. Coxhead, 1816.
8vo, pp. [ii], 70, with etched frontispiece portrait and 32 etched plates; some foxing, but a good copy; bound in contemporary English half green straight-grained morocco with drab sides, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, drab endpapers; a little scuffed and worn with loss at head of spine, corners bumped, cracks to hinges; engraved armorial bookplate of Samuel Herbert Hawes to front pastedown.
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The Dance of Death, from the original Designs of Hans Holbein, illustrated with thirty-three Plates, engraved by W. Hollar, with Descriptions in English and French. London, [B. McMillan] for J. Coxhead, 1816.
An attractive early nineteenth-century edition of Holbein’s Dance of Death, printed from Hollar’s etchings with descriptions in English and French and prefatory essays by the antiquary Francis Douce.
Holbein’s Dance of Death was painted in the early sixteenth century and etched by Hollar in the mid-seventeenth; the plates had been ‘till lately preserved in a noble family, and impressions from them are once more presented to the public, without the least alteration … In the present edition, however, it was found requisite that the plates should be retouched, and it has been done with the utmost attention to the preservation of their original spirit and character’ (p. 31).
The plates are here prefaced by essays by Douce on the life of Holbein and on the history of the danse macabre genre, offering – despite its rather critical opening (‘In the dark ages of monkish bigotry and superstition, the deluded people …’, p. 13) – an interesting account of early depictions both on the Continent and in Britain and of literary versions too. Douce had ‘first published on the dance of death in 1794, anonymously; during the four intervening decades he had amassed materials on, and devoted much research to, the subject’ (ODNB). In 1833 he would publish his seminal Dance of Death exhibited in elegant Engravings on Wood, with a Dissertation on the several Representations of that Subject.
