Du Simitière, Pierre Eugène | A scarce series of portraits of American Revolutionary patriots

Du Simitière, Pierre Eugène

Thirteen Portraits of American Legislators, Patriots and Soldiers Who Distinguished Themselves in Rendering Their Country Independent … Drawn from the Life by Du Simitière, Painter and Member of the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and Engraved by Mr. B. Reading. London: Published by W. Richardson, [1783]

4to (299 x 220 mm). Letterpress title-page and 13 handcolored engraved portraits; title-page lightly soiled and repaired at inner margin, stain in upper right corner on title-page extending through the first seven portrait sheets, some light foxing and finger-soiling. Retrospective half brown morocco over marbled boards, smooth spine tooled with gilt double rules, light brown lettering-piece, plain endpapers. 

First British edition of this important series of portraits, preceded only by the 1781 Paris edition. The portraits, as listed on the title, comprise George Washington, Baron von Steuben, Silas Deane, Joseph Reed, Govenor [sic] Morris, John Jay, W. H. Drayton, Henry Laurens, Jr., Samuel Huntingdon, John Dickenson [sic], and Benedict Arnold. The plates were issued uncolored, and the present copy was colored by hand at a later date. Although it seems curious to include Arnold in this roster of American patriots, he had not yet defected at the time that du Simitière submitted the originals to Paris. Du Simitière emigrated from his native Switzerland in 1766. He became an ardent patriot himself. One of his contributions to the war effort was to translate into French the appeals of the Continental Congress urging the inhabitants of the Province of Quebec to join the American revolutionary cause.

The series is extremely scarce: only two copies have sold at auction in the past fifty years (1967, 1991), and OCLC records only eight copies in institutions worldwide (one copy, at Harvard, lacks one portrait). ESTC cites only the slightly later edition issued with a variant title (Portraits of the Generals, Ministers, Magistrates, Members of Congress, and others, … in the Revolution of the United States of North America) over the joint imprint of Wilkinson and J. Debrett, which eliminated the portrait of the traitorous Benedict Arnold.

REFERENCE

Celebration of My Country 94; Howes D599; Revolutionary Hundred 73; Sabin 21446