SENAULT, Louis (calligrapher & engraver).
Heures nouvelles tirées de la Sainte Ecriture. Écrites et gravées par L. Senault.
Paris, "l'autheur" and Claude De Hansy, [1690 or soon after]. 8vo. With an engraved frontispiece, a richly engraved title-page with the title in a wreath of flowers with 2 dolphins and the crowned coat-of-arms of the Dauphine, and 260 engraved calligraphic text-pages, richly decorated and illustrated, including 8 engraved divisional titles, this copy with the frontispiece, the 4 illustration plates and 2 otherwise blank pages with gilt borders. 18th-century richly gold-tooled (browned) olive-green goatskin morocco, each board with a wide border, spine with the title in roman capitals in the 2nd of 6 compartments and a flower built up from several stamps plus several decorations in each of the other compartments, rolls on the raised bands and at the head and foot, gold-tooled turn-ins and board edges, 2 silver clasps with a stamped mark, red silk paste-downs, gilt edges, red silk ribbon marker. [1], [1 blank], 260 engraved pp. plus 5 engraved plates including frontispiece.
€ 4,500
Beautiful, wholly engraved calligraphic book of hours originally dedicated to Marie Anne Christine Victoire de Bavière (1660-1690), dauphine of France from 1680 to her death in 1690, in a luxurious contemporary binding. The text is calligraphed in a beautiful and very regular pointed-pen hand (the style that Senault in his writing manuals called an Italian bastarde) and decorated with landscapes, flowers and fruits, divine symbols, beautiful calligraphic designs of birds, a cross, human faces, mermaids, pen flourishes, words in decorative titling capitals and more than 100 richly decorated initial letters of various sizes. Many initials and head-pieces include little landscapes, others are decorated with flowers. The frontispiece and plates show portraits of saints and biblical scenes.
The great Paris writing master and engraver Louis Senault (1630-1680?) published several writing manuals, engraving them himself. He calligraphed and engraved the present book of hours, which went through at least four and possibly more printings, all from the same copper plates (except that the plate for the title-page was replaced between the first and second printings). Senault succeeded in preserving in his engraved books the full flavour of a contemporary manuscript, celebrating the exuberance of baroque decorative lettering.
With the armorial bookplates of Mr. de Badts de Cugnac with a marquess's crown and of Richard de Loménie with a count's crown. With an owner's stamp on the first free endleaf: HP (or PH) monogram (the P larger and with its main stroke through the centre of the H) in a rectangle, stamped in red (not in Frits Lugt database). In very good condition. Becker, The practice of letters, note to item 83; Bonacini 1689; Brunet III, col. 148; WorldCat 420227809, 469563921, 561037665, 931356021, 1005450858, 1069166041, 1176738483 (3 copies; cf. 724826592: 1 copy described as 1683), cf. Dorothy Miner/Walters Art Gallery, 2,000 years of calligraphy 101 (earlier printing); not in Berlin Kat.
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