Laborde, Alexandre Louis Joseph de, Comte
Paris 1773 – 1842 Paris

Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne.

Paris, De l’Imprimerie de P. Didot l’aîné avec les caractères de Bodoni, 1807–1820

Two volumes bound as four, folio (580 × 440 mm):

Volume 1, part i (1806): (61) ff. letterpress, signed π¹ (half-title) a–z¹ 1–36¹ 36bis¹ and paginated (2) i–xlvi 1–72 (2); plus engraved title, portrait (S.A.S. Le Prince de la Paix [i.e. Manuel de Godoy]), and sixty unnumbered plates (figures nos. 1–88) interleaved with the text. Volume 1, part ii (1811): (32) ff. letterpress, signed π¹ (half-title) ²π¹ (title-page) 37–66¹ and paginated (4) 73–130 (2), plus seventy-six unnumbered plates (figures nos. 89–189) interleaved with the text.

Volume 2, part i (1812): (43) ff. letterpress, signed π¹ (half-title) ²π¹ (title-page) a–z¹ 1–18¹ and paginated (4) 1–xlv (1, blank) 1–36; plus eighty unnumbered plates (figures nos. 1–90) interleaved with the text. Volume 2, part ii (1820): (62) ff. letterpress, signed π¹ (half-title) ²π¹ (title-page) a–z¹ aa–ss¹ 1–19¹ and pagi­nated (4) i–xci (i.e. 81, pp.35–44 skipped in numeration) (1, blank) 1–36 (2); plus fifty-six unnumbered plates (figures nos. 1–70) interleaved with the text, and two double-page maps.¹

Tissue guards before plates. A few plates browned or spotted, mostly in margins; overall in excellent state of preservation.

bound as four volumes in russia leather, dyed violet, covers decorated with frames of gilt and blind ornament.

Fine copy of this encyclopaedic work, composed of plates complementary to a series of historical discourses, remarks on the geography and natural history, manners and cus­toms, of the different regions of Spain. It is ‘the most magnificent, extensive, and accurate work published on Spain to that date’.² The author organises the material in four parts: ‘La España romana’ (Cataluña, Valencia, Extremadura), ‘La España árabe’ (Andalucía, including the Alhambra and Granada palaces), ‘España gótica y medieval’ (the Basque country, Aragón, Asturias, León), and ‘La España moderna’ (Navarra, Aragón, Castilla, in particular Madrid). Spain was then largely unknown to European travellers, and this book is claimed to have played a major role in the creation of that fascinating and exotic, but entirely fictional country, ‘la España de Mérimée’.³

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Laborde conceived the idea of writing a voyage pittoresque while travelling in Catalonia in 1797.⁴ Work began in earnest when he returned to Spain in 1800, as an attaché to Lucien Bonaparte’s embassy (concluded by the Treaty of Aranjuez, signed on 21 March 1801), when numerous draughtsmen were employed to make topographical views, plans, eleva­tions, and details of buildings, and to reproduce paintings and other art works, inscriptions and monuments.⁵ Both Spanish and French artists were engaged; the busiest were the architects François Ligier (or Liger) (1755–fl. 1803) and Jacques Moulinier (1753–1828),⁶ the painters Jean Lubin Vauzelle (1776–1837) and Florent-Fidèle-Constant Bourgeois du Castelet (1767–1841), and one Dutailly (fl. 1790–1803). Laborde himself made twenty-eight drawings; Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825) contributed at least five. A huge corpus was created, many more drawings than eventually utilised for the book.

Substantial groups of the drawings are now in the Collection Jacques Doucet in Paris (255 sheets, acquired 1967)⁷ and in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona (160 sheets, acquired in 1958);⁸ at least four drawings are in the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, and nine are recorded in Spanish private collections.⁹ Some 274 draw­ings were once gathered in a luxurious copy of the book printed on vellum.¹⁰

By 1805 Laborde had begun to pass these drawings to printmakers.¹¹ Some Spanish engravers were employed, but French engravers and etchers again predominate, with Louis Pierre Baltard, Jean Jérôme Beaujean, M.A. Benoist, Edmé Bovinet, Jacques-Joseph Coiny, Robert Daudet, François Déquevauviller, Jean Desaulx, Charles Louis Lingée, F.B. Lorieux, and Jean-Baptiste Reville especially favoured.

According to a prospectus for the publication, appearing in Madrid, in April 1806, the book was projected in seventy fascicules of six prints each (420 plates altogether).¹² A year later, the Parisian publisher forecast ‘soixante ou soixante-dix livraisons… chaque livraison sera composée de trois feuilles de texte et de six feuilles de gravures’.¹³ The book was com­pleted however in forty-eight parts (274 plates), the first two parts issued in the spring of 1807 and the last in June 1820.¹⁴ Some plates illustrative of Galicia, Asturias, the Kingdom of León, the Basque country, and Mallorca were never realised, owing to political instability and financial exigencies. Subscribers were presented with a choice between copies printed on ordinary paper, papier vélin, or on papier vélin with the plates avant la lettre, each livraison priced respectively 21, 36, and 60 francs.

The plates have captions in French, Spanish, and English and it is likely that Laborde planned editions in all three languages. An edition in Spanish, Viage pintoresco e histórico de España (translation by Father Juan Fernandez de Rojas), commenced publica­tion in Madrid in 1807, but was suspended after distribution of the third fascicule;¹⁵ no edition with the plates accompanied by an English text is known.

In January 1823 C.L.F. Panckoucke, publisher of the second edition of the Description de l’Égypte, circulated a prospectus for ‘Nouvelle publication de 200 exemplaires ’, to be printed by Didot ‘sur papier fin satiné’ and issued to subscribers in ninety-one livraisons (at a pace of two per month).¹⁶ His project does not seem to have advanced further.

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references Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung der Staatlichen Kunstbibliothek Berlin (Berlin 1939), no. 2769 (different make-up); Antonio Palau y Dulcet, Manual del libero hispano-americano: bibliografía general española e hispano-americana desde la tiempos (Barcelona 1954), vii, 128975; British Architectural Library, Early printed books 1478–1840: catalogue of the British Architectural Library Early Imprints Collection. Volume 5: Indices, Supplement, Appendices, Addenda and Corrigenda, compiled by Paul W. Nash et al. (Munich 2003), pp.2663–2666 no. 3961; Ulrike Steiner, Die Anfänge der Archäologie in Folio und Oktav: fremdsprachige Antikenpublikationen und Reiseberichte in deutschen Ausgaben, published to accompany the exhibition ‘Aufklärung – Antike in Buch und Bild’ in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau, 19 June–31 July 2005 (Ruhpolding 2005), pp.159–160 no. 133