The Catalogues of Heribert Tenschert: ‘Daphnis & Chloe’

Nicolas Barker, Winter 2021
Originally appeared in The Book Collector, Winter 2021 Issue

There can be no doubt that the catalogues, each one a substantial monument to its subject, that Heribert Tenschert has published over the last half-century, have been the grandest, in scope and physical form, produced by any bookseller in that period. To begin with, they dealt exclusively with illuminated medieval manuscripts, predominantly but not exclusively French. In these, Tenschert had the invaluable support of Eberhard König, whose penetrating eye and uncanny skill in pursuing details that identified artists’ names or unexpected links of provenance became a by-word. Some of these coups-de-maître were so startling and extensive that they grew beyond the normal dimensions of a catalogue to become separate monographs in a series entitled ‘Illuminationen’. Others linked books and persons, so that one catalogue led to another in unexpected ways that gave them a coherence as a series that could not have been expected at the outset. This was especially true of the two great series devoted to printed books of hours, a collection now numbering over 400 separate editions, which in total exceeds the largest estimates hitherto made of the quantity of such books.

Liturgical manuscripts and printed books have been in the majority, but Tenschert has spread further afield. The elegant reference library of R. Hartmann had already made up three catalogues (62–4) in 2010–12. ‘Univers Romantique’ (83) in four volumes with 2,000 pages and 2,500 colour reproductions brought together the finest collection of French illustrated books published between 1825 and 1875. Taking a theme further back in time, catalogue 84 ‘À Compartiments’, with 125 French inlaid bindings of 1675–1800, outdid even the famous Esmerian collection, while 85, ‘Der Wille zum Ruhm’, a collection celebrating the fame of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I brought together five copies of the fabulous 1517 Theuerdanck, three of them on vellum and three illuminated, multiple copies of the five subsequent editions, and also facsimiles, one a pioneering example of lithography, and other specimens of the emperor’s obsession with fame. Anticipating these and reverting to earlier themes, catalogues 80–82, ‘Paris mon Amour’, consisted of sixty-seven manuscript books of hours from the city in its palmary years. Most recently, the focus has turned to Flanders with catalogue 87 devoted to the complex Toulongeon Hours, and catalogue 88 to nine other Flemish illuminated books of hours.

Amid all these diverse splendours has come another, rather less predictable, catalogue 86, devoted to Daphnis and Chloe, the novel written originally in Greek by Longus about the turn of the second century, and translated into French by Jacques Amyot in the 16th, and thence into English by Sir Thomas North. This tale, in its French translation, was the subject in 1988 of the late Giles Barber’s Panizzi lectures, subtitled as ‘the markets and metamorphoses of an unknown bestseller’. ‘Unknown’ was perhaps unfair – after all, longevity in the book trade’s annals can hardly rank as oblivion. But we can see what he meant: Longus is not widely known for any other work, and the image that the title ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ brings to mind is a medley of Greek mythology, shepherds and shepherdesses on the island of Lesbos, revived and recycled in Italy and France in the 16th century, canonised in the rococo style in the 18th, whence it was subjected to all sorts of variations, paraphrase and caricature, attracting the eyes and talents of Bakst and Diaghilev, Gwen Raverat and the Ashendene Press, Chagall, Bonnard and Maillol, as well as achieving an edition of 10,000 copies (bestsellerdom indeed!) in the Spanish version of Juan Valera from the Instituto del Libro in Havana in 1969.

In the arc of the fame of the tale of Daphnis and Chloe that stretches from ad 200 to the present day a zenith is reached in the 18th century, the heyday of its illustration and, by extension, book-binding. Both reached the height of réclame in the edition called the ‘Regent’s’ in 1718. Exactly what part Philippe duc d’Orléans had in the genesis of this is not altogether clear. His illustrations do not now exist. They were not the first, nor the best: the credit for that is due to the Dutch artist Crispin de Passe. His plates first appeared from Toussaint du Bray in 1626, accompanying a new translation by Pierre de Marcassus. It was not until 1716 that plates to which the Regent’s name were linked came to reach a text, not Marcassus’s but Amyot’s, slightly adapted. They accompanied two different editions, the earlier apparently ‘À Paris, chez les Héritiers de Cramoisy’ and the other ‘À Amsterdam, Chez les Freres Westin’, clearly a deliberate misspelling of the famous Wetstein. This, the rarer of the two, is the first and most beautiful of the eighty copies in Tenschert’s catalogue. It contains two suites of engravings, that by Jean-Baptiste Scottin and the Régent series from the 1718 edition. It is distinguished as bound for the Comtesse de Verrue, the leading female bibliophile of the century, in olive green morocco with her arms and devices, probably therefore by Luc-Antoine Boyet. A second copy of this edition, in red morocco à la dentelle for Jean-Baptiste-Simon Boyer, Sieur de la Boissière, has two sets of the Scottin plates, one lightly inked, the other darker. It has fine Augsburg bronze varnish coloured endpapers, reproduced in the same position in the present catalogue.

There are no less than twelve copies of the 1718 édition dite du Régent, of which only 250 copies all told were printed. One is in red morocco, ex-Guy Pellion, two more, both bound by Bradel, in green and red, and another in red morocco doublé by Boyer. One of the famous copies of this edition, on papier fin, released in 1784 at the posthumous sale of Armand-Pierre-François de Chastre de Cangé de Billy, premier valet de garde-robe du roi, one of fifty-two such, is in a spectacular later binding. Another, in sharp contrast, was remargined to large quarto and bound in calf by Nicolas-Denis Derome le jeune for Armand-Jérôme Bignon, the royal librarian. Another fine paper copy was bound in inlaid morocco by Marius Michel for Robert Hoe, who also bought a similar copy bound by Francisque Cuzin. There are two more of the Chastre de Cange de Billy copies bound by Derome, one in vert de pomme morocco, and the catalogue entry conveniently lists all seventeen of the copies known from this source. There are also two copies of the separate printing of the plates only by the younger Coypel, Charles-Antoine, in 1724.

The next series of five copies came from a new edition in 1731, in two different settings of type. This includes one of Mme de Pompadour’s two copies, in calf aux armes by Derome, and another in inlaid dark red morocco by the ‘Atelier des Petits Classiques’, with Augsburg polychrome endpapers. There are no less than twelve copies of the 1745 edition with a newly engraved set of the Régent plates. They include two in à la dentelle bindings, and another with the arms of Louis XV that may have been intended for his mistress, Madame du Barry. The most beautiful of this group is in an inlaid décor à répétition binding by Antoine-Michel Padeloup with his label in citron, dark red and olive green morocco. There are also large paper copies in dark and lighter red morocco, in olive, with proof plates bound in, in dark blue morocco, and two in white calf, with red and blue or green inlaid decoration; two more copies, one in rococo red morocco, the other in blue, both by Louis Douceur, were expertly coloured with added floral borders.

Copies of a new edition printed in the following decade were published in Amsterdam by Jean Néaulme, who had the Régent plates, by now old and worn, copied by fashionable new engravers, Charles Eisen, Charles-Nicolas Cochin le jeune and Simon Fokke. In some, the original Greek of Longus reappeared, in the 1754 bilingual text printed in Amsterdam; these include the Hoe-Bishop coloured copy, and the large paper copies of Guillaume Pavée de Vendeuvre and André Langlois, the latter in brick-red morocco. Smaller format editions in duodecimo or octavo include one of 1779 bound in dark green, with arms inlaid in red, for Maria Josepha of Savoy, wife of the future Louis XVIII. The 1786 Bodoni edition is there in contemporary English red morocco, with an extra-illustrated copy of the 1787 Imprimerie de Monsieur edition. This introduces a new set of illustrations very much in the neo-classical style by François Gérard and Pierre Paul Prud’hon, which enhanced future editions, together with the revised Régent designs by Pierre-Antoine Martini. Another copy has twenty-five of the Martini etchings based on the Régent paintings, hand-coloured and on vellum. Another copy, Renouard’s, printed on vellum, has all twenty-nine of the original Martini drawings, with matching etchings hand coloured. Yet another 1787 copy, Esmerian’s, incorporated another set of twenty-two illustrations by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier.

The Régent designs persisted to the end of the century and were then overtaken by other designs by Nicolas-André Monsiau. A large quarto edition printed by Pierre Didot l’ainé in 1800 returned to monumental proportions. The first copy here is bound in red half-morocco by Charles Allô for Antoine Bordes, nephew of the famous collector Henri Bordes of Bordeaux. Duke Albert of Sachsen-Teschen had his copy bound by the great Viennese binder, Georg Friedrich Krauss, and André Langlois’s was in bright red morocco by Jean-Claude Bozerian the elder. Maylander and Capé bound other copies, and Renouard had his own edition, printed in 1803, bound by Léon Gruel. It was here that the sensational discovery by Paul-Louis Courier of a missing section of the original manuscript of Longus in Florence was first published. Besides all these, a total of eighty books, there is a supplement, describing an oil painting of Daphnis and Chloe in a classical landscape by Jean-Charles Frontier (1701–63) and ten more editions of the Longus text, all remarkable for one reason or another.

With this coda Tenschert’s great symphony might seem to have reached an end, but that is not to be the case. Longus’s Daphne and Chloe is only the forerunner of a larger, extraordinary project, a series of some fifteen catalogues to be issued over the next three or four years, covering French illustrated books of the 18th century. In the history of book illustration, no period can equal the 18th century in France, in diversity, both of subject and of medium, in size, large and small, and elegance. Gordon Ray’s The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914 (1986) rightly confirms this judgement – who but Heribert Tenschert would have settled the matter by putting together so many examples of the genre, while adding to them another dimension, that of bookbinding? We look forward to a series of similar catalogues, whose subject matter will go beyond the classic confines of mythology, but again illustrate the full range of French artistic genius (we have yet to dwell on the masterpieces of Charles Eisen and Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune) in draughtsmanship, engraving and bookbinding. It will become the encyclopaedia of its subject, a monument of its history.

Heribert TenschertJanuary 26, 2022