Fete des Vignerons

1833. [VEVEY]. [Fête des Vignerons, 1833]. Continuous panorama scroll, containing 30 consecutive lithographs (numbered 1-30) from the 1833 Festival of the Vignerons at Vevey, hand-coloured at the time of publication, backed with linen and conjoined to form a continuous scroll of 14.4 meters long. Plate size: oblong folio, 170 x 470 mm., in a new cloth folding box. Lausanne: Lithographie de Spengler & Cie, [1833]. An extremely rare, complete copy, in contemporary hand-colouring of this remarkable series of plates in scroll format depicting the 1833 Festival of the Vingerons at Vevey, Switzerland -- since 1791 this ancient festival has been (truncated) celebrated five times per century. The scroll shows the entire procession in panorama format; the procession moved in three groups: Herds and Flocks (plates 1-8), the Harvest (plates 9-18), and Winemakers (plates 19-30). The festival celebrates the vineyards and wine production in the Vevey area. The artist of the work was Christian Gottlieb Steinlen (1779-1847), a resident of Vevey who acted as the official artist for the 1833 Festival (see Thieme-Becker). Sources for the Festival of the Winegrowers are unusually diverse: besides Greco-Roman gods such as Bacchus (Plates 20 & 22) there were representations of Judeo-Christian myths such as the story of Noah (first winegrower in the Bible -- see Plate 27). OCLC records only the copy at Getty Center in the U.S. Vicaire 270. Brunet I, 616. Lipperheide 2870. Ruggieri 1142. Vinet 787. Brun, Schweizerisches Künstler-Lexikon IV, p. 415. Thieme-Becker XXXI, pp. 574-5. (Inventory #: 171428)