Homère / Henri Motte - Iliade - 1880

Homer's Iliad, with 24 large plates by Henri Motte, translated by Émile Pessonneaux

The Iliad from Maison Quantin is one of the most elegant French illustrated editions of this foundational text of Western literature. The text is the prose translation by Émile Pessonneaux, a renowned Hellenist and translator of the XIXth century, also known for his versions of Aristophanes and Sophocles. The work is enriched with 24 out-of-text plates, reproduced by heliogravure from the illustrator's works, protected by tissue guards, one per canto of the epic. The reproduction technique used—the heliogravure, a high-quality photomechanical process flourishing at the time—ensures remarkable fidelity to the original compositions.

The illustrator, Henri-Paul Motte (Paris, December 15, 1846 – Bourg-la-Reine, March 25, 1922), was a painter and decorator-architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a pupil of the great Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, from whom he inherited a taste for archaeological precision, theatrical staging, and Mediterranean light. After a promising start at the Salon of 1874 with Le Cheval de Troie—the large canvas purchased by the Wadsworth Atheneum—and themes of antiquity and myth treated in a refined academic style (La Pythie, 1875; Circé et les compagnons d’Ulysse, 1879; Passage du Rhône par Hannibal, 1878), Motte devoted himself from 1880 to illustrating the great Homeric book. His plates for the Iliad form a cycle of full-page illustrations with a strong stylistic coherence, powerfully and rigorously rendering the epic’s key scenes—the assemblies of the gods on Olympus, the heroic duels, Patroclus’ death, Hector’s funeral—and in a spirit very close to contemporary academic history painting. In the same year, 1880, he received a Third Class medal at the Salon for César s’ennuie. He was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1892 and bronze medalist at the 1900 Universal Exposition.

This edition is preserved notably in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Date unknown (circa 1880), quarto large format (about 21 × 29 cm), IV-356 pages, loose leaves or pamphlet under publisher's wrapper, not trimmed. Cover rubbed and stained, with various tears, notably along the hinges, spine broken with losses. Browning scattered, mainly on the tissue guards and the pages nearby.