Academy for Grown Horsemen, An

London: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1808. With Twenty-Nine Hand Colored Etched Plates by Thomas Rowlandson

ROWLANDSON, Thomas, illustrator. [BUNBURY, Henry]. GAMBADO, Geoffrey. An Academy for Grown Horsemen Containing the completest instructions for Walking, Trotting, Canering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling. [and] The Annals of Horsemanship: Containing Accounts of Accidental Experiments and Experimental Accidents, both successful and unsuccessful; Communicated by various Correspondents to the author… London: Printed for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1808.

First edition, first issue with the Hand-Colored Rowlandson plates. (truncated) Small octavo (6 5/8 x 4 inches; 169 x 102 mm.). [iv], xvi, 28; xvi, 69, [1, directions to the binder], [2, advertisements], pp. Twenty-nine hand colored etched plated by Thomas Rowlandson, including two frontispieces.

Bound ca. 1900 by Rivière & Son (stamp-signed on front turn-in) in full polished tan calf, covers with double gilt rules, spine with five raised bands, decoratively tooled in compartments, two green morocco gilt lettering labels, gilt board edges and turn-ins, top edge gilt, others uncut, dark blue coated end-papers. Expertly and almost invisibly rebacked with the original spine laid-down. A near fine copy, the plates bright and fresh.

According to ABPC it would appear that the last copy of this book to appear at auction was at Swann Galleries, NY, in 1979.

“Gambado is said to have been Francis Grose, compiler of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” (Riely, John C. Horace Walpole and ‘the Second Hogarth’, in Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, Autumn, 1975). In addition to his works on antiquities, satiric essays, and volumes on non-standard words and meanings, Francis Grose (1731-1791) wrote Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: with an Essay on Comic Painting (1788); “though only an indifferent draughtsman, he mixed with professional and amateur artists, and exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1767–8 and at the Royal Academy in the nine years following” (Oxford Online DNB) - the frontispiece portrait of “Gambado” in The Academy, unsigned (all other signed Bunbury), bears an uncanny resemblance to Grose: a “stocky, corpulent figure which Grose himself caricatured (DNB),” perhaps here. (Inventory #: 03284)