Item No: #6008 Une aventure d'amour a Venise. Gerda Wegener, Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, illustrated by.
Une aventure d'amour a Venise
Une aventure d'amour a Venise

In the Original Wrappers

Une aventure d'amour a Venise

Notes: xiv, 164 pages bound in two volumes, as issued. Illustrated by Wegener, with eight full-page color etchings by Andre Lambert after her watercolors and many small wood engravings by G. Aubert based on her designs.

The text is a section of Casanova's memoirs describing his relationship with 'M.M.', one of his mistresses who was a nun in the convent at Murano, a small island in the Venetian lagoon. Wegener offers richly colored interpretations of Casanova's seductions, employing beautiful blues to evoke the night sky. She is best known for her explicit illustrations of female couplings which, frankly, have a cartoonish character and are most notable for their content than for their style. Not to disappoint fans of Wegener's erotica, in her view of Venice, the women tend to wear bodices that are a few sizes too small and which release their contents at inopportune moments. In the future, your cataloguer expects her to become better known for her dreamy paintings in books like this one, than for boobs and buns.

Wegener, nee Gottlieb, a Danish artist and illustrator, married a fellow artist, Einar Wegener, in 1904. By 1912, Einar was calling herself Lili Elbe and she and Gerda were living as a lesbian couple in Paris. Lili became one of Gerda's most frequent models; it is. Wegener and Elbe are the subjects of the film The Danish Girl, based on a novel by David Ebershoff.

This book was published in an edition of 500 copies, with five different limitations.

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). Both volumes fine in original wrappers. Some of the gatherings are beginning to come loose as might be expected with a book intended for rebinding. With the original publisher's glassine nearly intact.

This is 226 of 500, one of 414 printed on velin d'arches paper. A lovely set, seldom found in the original binding. Housed in a black folding clamshell box.

Publication: Paris: Le Livre du Bibliophile, 1927.

Item No: #6008

Sold