TISSOT JAMES JACQUES La Sainte Bible (Ancien Testament) 2

Sale 2140 - Lot 85

Price Realized: $ 8,400

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000

(TISSOT, JAMES JACQUES.) La Sainte Bible (Ancien Testament). Etched portrait of Tissot in Volume 1, frontispieces, over 300 mounted color illustrations, and three states of 40 hors text plates by Tissot: two states before letters consisting of a set of uncolored heliogravures and a partly hand-colored set, and a finished colored state, all with lettered tissue guards. 2 volumes. Large thick folio, bound into elaborate crushed brown morocco with relief image of Moses pressed into resin on front covers with gilt medallions of grapes at either end, decorative bands at sides, spines with gilt sheaf of wheat, title and volume labels, and five raised bands, doublures of morocco with similar decorative motifs, watered silk endleaves, by pagnant, few minor scuffs and rubbed areas; scattered light foxing, mostly along deckled fore edges and top margins; original wrappers bound in. Paris: M. de Brunoff & Co., 1904

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number 47 of only 40 copies of the portrait edition containing three suites of the plates. Tissot died in 1902 and the project was finished by his six assistants. In his later life, Tissot abandoned his usual subjects and turned to religious topics, treating them with a degree of topographical and archeological allusion. In the 1982 exhibition catalogue of Biblical paintings of J. James Tissot at the Jewish Museum, Gert Schiff pointed out that the artist "felt free to change people's ages, to introduce motifs that were not strictly Biblical, and in general to skirt the drudgery of replication. Imaginative truth, not reconstructed 'literal truth,' was what he was after. If he thought that brass instruments would add a Berliozian note to the ram's horn trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho, he put them in. If he thought that it made better sense if Cain was twice as old as Abel, he went ahead. If he thought that mouth to mouth resuscitation would have been just the thing for Elijah when he wanted to raise the widow's son from the dead, he went ahead with that, too, even if it did rather take away from the miracle."