Fifty Wonderful Portraits

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Fifty Hand-Coloured Engraved Portraits of Remarkable Persons. Quarto, [2], 8 pp (pl descriptions), fifty hand-colored engraved plates, printed on pink paper, attractively bound by Kelly & Sons (stamp-signed in gilt on front turn-in) in full dark green straight grain morocco. Covers decoratively bordered in gilt and blind, spine decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt, board edges decoratively tooled in gilt, turn-in ruled in gilt, all edges gilt, marbled end papers. A wonderful copy of this extremely scarce album of portraits. (279*216 mm). (Wilson's 'Wonderful Characters' [1821] p. 8). Robert Cooper (fl. 1800-1836) was largely employed during the first quarter of the century in engraving portraits. Among the publications on which he was engaged were: 'La Belle Assemblée,' a fashionable periodical; 'Old Mortality' and other novels by Sir Walter Scott; Lodge's 'Portraits of Illustrious Personages;' Chaberlaine's 'Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein;' Tresham and Ottley's 'British Gallery of Pictures,' &c. He was employed by the Duke of Buckingham to execute some private plates for him; the most important and the best known of these is the engraving Cooper executed of the 'Chandos' portrait of Shakespeare.Cooper was also a very prolific engraver of book plates and vignettes, &c. (D.N.B.). Among the attractions are: Nathaniel Bentley, The well known Dirty Dick, who lived alone for forty years, during which neither brush nor broom was used in his house, nor did he ever wash his face or hands; Daniel Dancer, The Remarkable Miser, who during a life of seventy-eight years evinced the most insatiable thirst of gold recorded in the history of human nature; the Chevalier d'Eon, Who many years passed as a Woman; Signora Josephine Girardelli, The well known Fire-eater, who would pour boiling lead into her mouth, and emit the same indented with the mark of her teeth; Jeffery Hudson, Dwarf to King Charles the First; Joan d'Arc, The Maid of Orleans; Daniel Lambert, who had attained to such a state of corpulency that he was prevailed upon to exhibit himself. He weighed fifty-two stone, eleven pounds; measured three feet one inch round the leg, and nine feet four inches round the body; Henry Lemoine, The Eccentric Bookseller & Author; Peter the Wild Boy, who was an idiot, found in the woods of Haemlin, near Hanover, by King George I. in 1725, and brought to England; Joanna Southcott, the Extraordinary Fanatic, who declared herself the one spoken of in Revelations, the bride, the lamb's wife, and woman clothed with the sun; and Renwick Williams, Commonly called The Monster, the artificial flower-maker, who in 1789 evinced a most unnatural propensity in cutting and stabbing females after nightfall. A more copious account of these remarkable persons may be found in Wilson's 'Wonderful Characters' [1821] (p. 8).