Seen top right is one of a pair of coloured etchings of 1788 by Henri Léveque that show ‘Monsieur Desaussure, son fils et ses guides...’ on the Tacul glacier. Sold for £3800, these were presumably coloured copies of the engraved plates made for one of the more famous of early Alpine works, Horace-Benedict de Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes, first published in four vols. in Neuchâtel in the years 1779-96.
Illustrated below right is one of the dozen chromolithos by Vincent Brooks that illustrate an 1859 first edition of Edmund Coleman’s Scenes from the Snowfields... the Upper Ice-World of Mont Blanc, an 1859 series of views, dedicated to Ruskin, that resulted from the artist-mountaineer’s annual holidays in the Alps. This folio collection is one of the scarcer and more valuable of mountaineering books and this copy is, I think, the first seen at auction since 1995. It sold at £6000.
Alpine views by Jean-Antoine Linck (1766-1843) were much admired and one watercolour, Vue de la sommité du Rocher du Couverele, sold at £7500, while a two-section watercolour and bodycolour view of the Vallée de Chamonix... reached £12,000.
Scenes from the Snowfields and the Ice World
A travel sale held by Christie’s South Kensington on April 29 was a mix of books, prints and pictures and seen here are two items from a section of that sale devoted to the Alpine regions.
