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Regulations for the Uniform & Dress of the Navy and Marine Corps of the United States. From the Original Text and Drawings in the Navy Department.

Philadelphia: Printed for the Navy Department, by T. K. and P. G. Collins, 1852. Folio (13.875” x 11.5”), recent half navy blue morocco with navy blue cloth, gilt morocco title label on upper cover. 16 pp., 14 chromolithographic plates and 2 black and white lithographic plates. CONDITION: Good, small reinstated loss to upper left corner of title page, a few short repaired tears to upper edge of title page, damp stains to lower right margins throughout, not affecting text or image; one page with sympathetic repair to lower right corner and margin, two other pages with reinforcements to verso of right margins. Plates clean and fresh.

First edition of this volume of Navy dress regulations with plates by “one of the pioneer American color lithographers,” Peter S. Duval.

The first five plates show full-length views of a total of twenty one sailors in varying uniforms and subsequent plates detail elements of those uniforms, from cuffs and collars to caps and swords. All the collations we have found call for fifteen pages and fifteen plates; the volume offered here has sixteen pages and sixteen plates.

All lithographs are after drawings by Joseph Goldsborough Bruff (1804–1889), who attended West Point and then worked as a draftsman for the Navy and a cartographer for the Army. He is best known today for his extraordinary illustrated gold rush diary.

Peter S. Duval (1805–1886) was an expert French lithographer who was recruited in 1831 by Cephas P. Childs to work for Childs & Inman, a lithographic firm in Philadelphia. He soon left to partner with George Lehman, and together they produced “two of the masterpieces of early American lithography” (Last), the portraits of Native American chiefs for James O. Lewis’s Aboriginal Port-Folio (1835) and Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836). “One of the main contributors to the development of American lithography” (Last), his work garnered praise from Queen Victoria as “the prettiest…she had seen from America” (Wainwright, p. 62).

The first five chromolithographs in this volume were accomplished by Christian Schussele (ca. 1824–1879; spelled “Schuessele” on the plate) who was “the best of [Duval’s] chromolithographers” and to whom Duval undoubtedly owed some of his success (Wainwright, p. 62). Schussele was born in Alsace and studied in Paris before settling in Philadelphia in 1848 and becoming one of “the most distinguished of all who drew on stone” (Wainwright, p. 82). His true interest lay in painting, however, and after leaving Duval he pursued a successful career as a painter and taught for many years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Find Arts, where he mentored Thomas Eakins.

REFERENCES: Groce, George C. and David H. Wallace. The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860 (Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 199–200; Last, Jay T. The Color Explosion (Hillcrest, 2005), pp. 72–73; Wainwright, Nicholas P. Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography (1958); Sabin 68960.

Item #7508

Price: $5,500.00