Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

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Lot n° 19
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8000 - 9000 EUR
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Faust, a tragedy translated into French by Mr. Albert Stapfer, with a portrait of the author and seventeen drawings based on the main scenes of the book and executed on stone by Mr. Eugène Delacroix. Paris, Charles Motte and Sautelet, 1828. In-folio (415 x 275 mm) from (2) ff, 1 portrait, IV pp. 148 pp., 17 plates without text: half calf with corners, spine ribbed and decorated in gold and cold pressed, brown morocco title coin, untrimmed, slipcase (Maylander). Cover preserved. Copy on Dutch paper in dovecote format with the lithographs on white vellum. Partly original edition of Albert Stapfer's translation. First edition of the 18 original lithographs of Delacroix, including the portrait of Goethe, printed on China appliqué paper. Remarkable suite of original prints by the Romantic painter par excellence, testifying to an unprecedented mastery of the plastic resources of lithography at the time. The eighteen plates were executed between 1826 and 1827, after the painter had attended a theatrical performance of Faust in London in 1825: struck by the staging, he endeavoured to retranscribe its fantastic aspect in the lithographs commissioned by the publisher Charles Motte, which were originally intended to appear in album form. The painter was reluctant to use them to illustrate a book, and later revised his judgment. Copy of Champollion-Figeac. Sent from the publisher to Champollion-Figeac on the cover. This is Delacroix's only illustration for a contemporary's text. A romantic manifesto that scandalized contemporaries but delighted Goethe. "Delacroix has gone beyond my own conception for scenes I wrote myself," the author confessed in conversations with Eckermann, praising the "colossal effect" of the compositions: the critics were nevertheless severe and the book a failure. The painter had conceived his illustration as a kind of artistic manifesto of the New Romantic School, a provocation, at the very moment when Victor Hugo
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