A Practical Essay on the Art of Colouring and Painting Landscapes in Water Colours

1812. CLARK, J[ohn]. H[eaviside]. A Practical Essay on the Art of Colouring and Painting Landscapes in Water Colours. [4], 28 pp. Illustrated with 10 aquatint engravings of which 7 are coloured by hand. Folio, 370 x 280 mm, contemporary Cambridge-style paneled calf, covers with Greek key border in gilt and floral roll and corner pieces in blind, spine (relaid) gilt in six compartments between raised bands, all edges marbled. London: Edward Orme, 1812. WITH: John Heaviside CLARK and William GILPIN. A Practical Illustration of Gilpin's Day, Representing the Various Effects on Landscape Scenery from Morning till Night, in Thirty Designs from Nature. [4], viii, [32] pp, with 30 hand-colored aquatint engravings by Clark after Gilpin. London: Edward Orme, 1811. A magnificent set of these two exceptionally beautiful and rare early nineteenth century colourplate books. The first volume is the second edition of this detailed artist's manual for landscape painting featuring colour plate illustrations, each with the pallet of colours required for its rendering depicted below the scene. The text spells out how to properly apply the pigments to various elements in landscape painting. John Heaviside Clark (ca. 1771-1836) was an established landscape painter who frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Abbey, Life in England, cites the first edition of this title, published in 1807. For the second volume Clark drew the title of Gilpin's Day from a poem in Gilpin's Essay on Pictorial Beauty, which celebrates the "arch ethereal . . . pregnant with change perpetual, from the morning's purple dawn, till the last glimm'ring ray of russet eve." Gilpin's Day was intended primarily as a drawing book, with aquatints the "nearest approach to actual water-colour paintings that I have met with in a book." (Martin-Hardie) The 30 plates (each with page of text, except plate 10, which has two pages) give the range of effects from "Dawn of Day" to "Waning Moon," passing through various sunrises, clouds and haze, storms, rainbows, lightning, and moonlight. The plate texts provide precise details for coloring each scene so as to resemble as closely as possible a watercolor sketch. An unusually clean set of these extremely rare works. The binding has been rebacked, and is sound. Of the first title, OCLC lists no copies of this edition, but copies of the first edition of 1807, at Metropolitan Museum, Huntington, Getty, Morgan,Yale and Winterthur. Of the second OCLC lists Yale, UCLA, U of Florida, Art Institute of Chicago and Kent State in the U.S.