Heath’s Book of Beauty
Fine fore-edge painting on the gutter, depicting an English countryside landscape.
Heath’s Book of Beauty, published in 1832, quickly became a bestseller in Victorian society: the text gathers portraits, written and illustrated, of ladies of English high society, together with poems and romantic short stories. The engravings are the work of the author of the texts, Charles Heath (1785–1848), a pioneer of British lithography.
The book was published under the auspices of Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, a friend of Byron and Charles Dickens. She held a literary salon at her house in Kensington from 1836 until her death in 1849, an essential gathering place for many distinguished foreigners — Vigny and Lamartine visited on several occasions.
She is buried, in a pyramid-shaped tomb, in the cemetery of Chambourcy, in the Yvelines, beside her lover Alfred d’Orsay, painter, dandy and patron of the arts, appointed superintendent of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1852 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
From the library of Lord Cyril Flower, first Baron Battersea (bookplate).