1762-63 Anecdotes of Painting in England

Description

First Edition, Illustrated, Leather Binding

The first edition.

Four volumes bound in two, being the three volumes of 'Anecdotes of Painting in England', alongside one volume of the continuation 'A Catalogue of Engravers'. 

Without Volume IV of 'Anecdotes of Painting in England', which was published in 1780. 

Volume I of 'Anecdotes of Painting in England' is illustrated with a frontispiece, and fifteen plates.

Volume II of 'Anecdotes of Painting in England' is illustrated with twenty-five plates.

Volume III of 'Anecdotes of Painting in England' is illustrated with thirty-seven plates.

'A Catalogue of Engravers' is illustrated with nine plates. 

Collated, all plates are present. 

'Anecdotes of Painting in England' is an interesting history of painting in England, discussing anecdotes of various painters throughout English history.

In this work, the author and editor depict the Georgian social and political scene through memoirs and notes on arts, painting, and engraving, and is a useful primary source of historians despite being "heavily biased".

Included are the state of painting in the reign of Henry III to Henry VII, painters in the reign of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, architecture during the reign of Henry VIII, artists during the interregnum and the reign of Charles II, architectures during the reign of Charles II, an account of William Hogarth, the architects in the reign of George II, painters of enamel and miniature in the reign of George II, and finally, the history of modern gardening.

George Vertue was an engraver and antiquary. He kept notebooks on British art for the first half of the eighteenth century, on which this work was based off. He spent most of his life researching the history of British art, accumulating forty notebooks of research.

Horace Walpole purchased these notebooks and edited them, basing 'Anecdotes of Painting in England' upon these notebooks. Walpole was an art historian and politician, also the writer of the first Gothic novel 'The Castle of Otranto'.