Spain by the Baron Ch. D'Avillier. Illustrated by Gustave Doré. Translated by J. Thomson, F.R.G.S. DAVILLIER, Charles & DORÉ, Gustave (illustrator). ART & ARCHITECTURE,TRAVEL & EXPLORATION

Large 4to. (34.5 x 25 cm). pp.xiii+520. Publishers' original pictorial green cloth by Leighton, elaborately decorated in gilt and black on front cover and on spine, yellow-coated endpapers, all edges gilt. Title-page printed in red and black. Richly illustrated with over one hundred engraved plates and numerous text illustrations. Ex libris Ernest Charles Ellis with his bookplate to front pastedown. Some occasional foxing most notably to title and frontis., minor restorations to cloth at spine extremoties, generally a very good copy. First published in French in 1874. "One of the most beautiful books by Gustave Doré" (Carteret). "Although this book came out in 1874, the illustrations for it began to be published in 1862. When Doré went to Spain in 1862 to do the Don Quixote illustrations he became fascinated with the people and culture of Spain. So in 1862, the French weekly travel journal Le Tour du Monde began a serial on Spain featuring Dore's engravings and text by Baron Charles Davillier. Altogether, Doré drew 164 full-page plates and 160 vignettes for Spain, completing the project in 1873. When Hachette published the work in book form in 1874, it contained 306 of the 324 magazine engravings, and two of those were new. While there are only about a dozen editions with the original Davillier text, there are about 70 editions with some of Doré's Spain engravings used with about 30 different texts, including those by Alexandre Dumas, Theophile Gautier, Edmondo de Amicis, William Prescott, and Ernest Hemingway" (Malan. Gustave Doré Adrift on dreams of splendor. p. 129). The illustrator of Don Quixote (1863) had a predilection for Spain: "his pencil drew with astonishing verve the fierce, singularly picturesque types that are the beggars, the bohemians, the toreadors and the pitiless picadors. graceful scenes, the slender silhouettes of the Andalusians form a striking contrast next to so many original figures. However colorful all the artist's compositions are, they are, however, criticized for being too exuberant. We prefer an excess of life to coldness and lack of originality" (Leblanc).