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: W. Richardson, [1783]

4to  (11 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.; 292 x 216 mm). Letterpress title-page and 13 hand-colored engraved portraits; title-page guarded, stain in upper right corner on title-page extending through the first 7 portraits, occasional, light foxing outside the plate marks, some spotting in the portrait backgrounds of Charles Thompson and Samuel Huntington and on Benjamin Arnold's jacket, lower portion of oval frame for Thompson's portrait retouched with white gouache. Half brown morocco over marbled boards, smooth spine tooled with gilt double rules, light brown lettering piece, plain endpapers.

Acquisition: William Reese

Howes D599; Sabin 21446

First British edition of this important series of portraits, preceded only  by the 1781 Paris edition. The portraits 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 hand-colored 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 the appeal to the French in Canada to join General Montgomery's invading forces in 1776.

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).