GAMELIN, JACQUES. 1738-1803.


Nouveau recueil d'ostologie et de myologie, dessin d'apres nature ... pour l'utilit des sciences et des arts. Toulouse: J.F. Desclassan, 1779. 2 parts in one volume, broadsheets (550 x 403 mm). Title-pages for each part with etched vignette, 2 etched frontispieces, etched portrait of Baron de Puymaurin with a dedication by Gamelin below, 10 large etched vignettes in text, 82 etched and engraved plates, including 11 preceded by outline plates keyed to the text, 26 text leaves. Early 20th century quarter morocco, joints and corners repaired, endpapers detached. Some light mostly marginal staining, one plate with short marginal tear, one with repair on verso. Provenance: Juan Carlos Akumada (1890-1976), Buenos Aires surgeon (ink stamp on verso of frontispiece and last leaf, bookplate).FIRST EDITION. "The plates in this work are more fantastic than any other anatomy, suggesting the work of Goya, who may have known or studied with Gamelin since Gamelin taught in Rome during the time Goya was there" (Garrison-Morton). Jacques Gamelin (1738-1803) "is acknowledged as one of the 'little masters' of French eighteenth-century painting. The plates for his anatomical atlas, issued in an edition of only 200 copies, were prepared from drawings made at his own dissection facility; they are distinct from the plates of other works of its type, being larger, more artistically varied, and more expressive and fantastic in their conception. Gamelin's plates show a constant interplay between the artistic and the anatomic: emblematic images in the seventeenth-century tradition, vignettes in the coquettish eighteenth-century manner, and classic studies of figures in repose and movement vie with straightforward 'medical' depictions of bones and muscles" (Norman). Although all the plates were designed by Gamelin and 18 bear his signature, most were executed by Jacques Lavalle (and a few by Martin). WITH: MOUTON, SIMONE. Editor. J. Gamelin, 1738-1803. Carcassone, France: Musee Municipal, 1938. 8vo. Black and white photographic illustrations. Printed wrappers. Museum exhibition catalog. Wear to wrappers, some corner creasing. Choulant-Frank, p 352; Garrison-Morton 401.1; Blake, p 165; Norman 872; Waller 3404.