Nouvelle Collection de Quarante-Deux Vues de Saint-Pétersbourg et de ses Environs, Dessinées d'après Nature par Divers Artistes. Accompagnées d'un Plan de la Ville, Divisé par Carrés de Renvois, pour s'Orienter Facilement, à l'Usage des Étrangers

St. Petersburg: Chez Alexandre Pluchart. Grande Morskoy, Maison Kossikoffsky, No. 69, 1826. Oblong folio. (13 3/4 x 20 inches). 44 ff. Letterpress title-page, engraved hand-colored city plan with a keyed reference sheet, table of contents, 44 lithograph views of St. Petersburg's buildings and monuments printed on rectos, versos blank. All but 3 lithographs are titled in French: 1 is in English, 2 are untitled. Bound to style in quarter straight grained red morocco and nineteenth-century paper boards

Pluchart's celebrated album of views of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg in all its Imperial splendor, with an extraordinary 44 plates plus a (truncated) hand-colored map.

"St. Petersburg was especially lucky with lithography. If all the rest of its images - in paintings, watercolors, engravings, and photographs - were lost and only lithographic views of St. Petersburg remained, even then it would be possible to fully judge it, and not only about the beauty and significance of its monuments or the special character of its wide avenues and canals, but also about the very soul of this ghostly and monumental, 'official' and poetic city that grew out of the swamp." - A. N. Benois St. Petersburg is here in all its finery, in the days when its elite spoke French and self-consciously adapted Western European cultural trends, before the Bolshevik Revolution and State Communism. The boulevards in the present copy are wide, the palaces grand, and the gardens large. This example of the 1826 edition of Pluchart's album has 44 views, not the usual 42, in addition to the hand-colored map "Nouveau Plan Routier de la Ville de St. Petersbourg," as well as the title, two reference keys. Captured here in Pulchart's guide to the city are the Winter Palace, Kazan Cathedral, St. Isaac's, the Summer Garden, the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, the Royal Exchange, the Imperial Theater, the Tauride Palace, and the Neva. Pluchart was a lithographer, typographer, painter, and publisher, who was born in Valenciennes, France, and moved to Germany after the French Revolution. In Germany, he worked for the French royalist publisher Pierre Françoise Fauche. In 1806, he was invited to St. Petersburg by the head of the French-language Journal du Nord to be its director of typography. Essentially a semi-official organ of the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the magazine acted as a counterpoint to Napoleonic propaganda. Pluchart came to occupy several official posts, but he continued his publishing practice, founding a printing house in 1808 on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in central St. Petersburg. A lithographic firm followed in 1818. That firm published the present album of views in 1826 in response to the growing number of European tourists visiting the city. Iterations of the album began to be published as early as 1821 and continued through 1827. For Nouvelle Collection, Pluchart worked with the best Russian artists of the time, including A. Martynov, A. Orlowsky, K. Kolman, P. Alexandrov, K. Beggrov, A. Brullov, and others. According to Tevyashov, Pluchart issued at least five editions of this album of lithograph views, all of which are rare: 1821-22 on 24 leaves; 1823 on 25 leaves; 1824 on 36 leaves; 1826 on 42 leaves, though the present example of the 1826 has 44 plates plus the map; and 1827 on 46 leaves. A copy of the earliest edition is at Harvard; this copy has nearly twice its plates. Only two copies with 43 plates or more are seen in institutions. List of Plates 1. Porte Triomphale. 2. Nouveau Pont à l'Entrée de la Promenade. 3. Chateau Imperial de Catherinehoff. 4. Pont de Chaînes, vis-a-vis du Château Impérial. 5. Le Pavillon des Lions. 6. Vauxhall de Catherinehoff. 7. Maisons Russes Café et Restauration. 8. Le Grand Theatre Imperial. 9. Le Palais Imperial. 10. Le Palais Impérial vue Prise de la Petite Millionne. 11. Chancelleries de l'Etat Major. 12. L'Amirauté et son Boulevard, près du Palais Impérial d'Hiver. 13. Catherine II a Pierre I. 14. Le Quai Anglais, près du Sénat - Dirigeant. 15. Pont d'Isaac et Nouvelle Eglise. 16. L'Académie des Arts. 17. La Bourse. 18. La Forteresse. 19. [Untitled]. 20. L'Arcade de l'Hermitage. 21. Theatre Imperial de l'Hermitage près de l'Hotel de France. 22. Le Palais de Marbre. 23. Le Jardin d'Ete. 24. L'Académie des Sciences. 25. Quai de la Cour. 26. Le Palais de S. A. L. de Grand Duc Michel. 27. Nouveau Pont en Chaînes, près du Jardin d'Ete. 28. L'Arsenal. 29. Palais de la Tauride. 30. L'Église de Casan. 31. L'Hôtel de Ville et l'Eglise Catholique. 32. Vue de l'Eglise Catholique, a St. Petersbourg. 33. Les Grandes Boutiques. 34. La Pont d'Anitschkoff, pres de la Maison de Mr. Narischkin. 35. Bibliotheque Imperiale. 36. L'Hôpital des Pauvres. 37. Campagne de S. E. D. Narischkin. 38. Campagne du Comtesse de Laval. 39. Palais d'Yelaguine. 40. Le Palais Imperial a Kamenoi Ostroff. 41. Vue de la Collonnade de Cameron, a Tsarscoe-Selo. 42. The Residence of John Booker Esquire, His Britannic Majesty's Vice-Consul at Cronstadt, in Russia. 43. [Untitled].

Somov, "La Russie dans la presse des émigrés: Altona, Hambourg, Brunswick et Saint-Pétersbourg, Conservatoire national de Saint-Pétersbourg," E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, 4 (2016): 160-190. State Hermitage Museum Educational Museum Program, "Petersburg in Early Russian Lithography." Tevyashov,Opisanie neskolkikh gravur i lithograpfii [Description of several engravings and lithographs], SPb., (1912), pp.9,13. (Inventory #: 40859)