Description

Original hand-coloured engraved plate. Slightly chipped on paper. Edges gilt. Large 4to. (37 x 27 cm). With its separate sheet of descriptive bilingual text in English and French. An attractive, richly colored and detailed engraved image. Very good, bright. An original plate from Dalvimart's famous and extremely rare work 'The costume of Turkey', first edition in 1802. Little is known about Octavien Dalvimart, besides the facts that he worked in Britain as painter and engraver, and that he was living in Paris in 1803. According to the prologue to this edition, he travelled during four years (starting in 1796), always drew from nature, and was in Athens in 1797. This elegant work was first published in 1802, and again in 1818 and 1820. It includes 60 drawings of human types from the Ottoman Empire. (Abbey Travel 370; Colas 782; Lipperheide 1422). The explanatory texts, in English and French, are based on extracts from works by Baron de Tott, J. Dallaway, G.A. Olivier, M. Montague, J. Pitton de Tournefort, ?ouradgea d'Ohsson and others. Dalvimart's drawings have been used in similar albums and illustrated other travel accounts. Human types are precisely drawn and handsomely depicted in very real colors. "This may be considered as the companion of the last plat. The dress, though not elegant, is not uninteresting. The Arabian women of the desert wear a number singular ornaments; large metal rings in the ears, others of the same kind upon the ancles and arms, pieces of coral hung about hem, and also necklaces of all sorts. They sometimes even hang small bells to their hair, and the young girls fix them to their feet. And it is not an uncommon custom among the Bedouins, as with the more civilized Arabians, to puncture different parts of the body and insert a blue dye.". etc.