The most important set of Don Quixote volumes to come to auction in thirty years is to be offered at auction on December 14 at Sotheby’s Paris, in conjunction with rare books dealer Jean-Baptiste de Proyart. Estimated at €400,000-600,000, this extraordinary offering comprises spectacular editions of both volumes of Cervantes prized work, presented in matching English bindings dating to 1750. With a shared provenance traceable back over 320 years, they are among the oldest known sets of both volumes together.
Beloved for its liveliness and panorama of Spanish society, Don Quixote became legendary almost immediately when released, with the author achieving fame throughout Europe and the New World, and the book being widely copied and pirated by at least three separate publishers. In the four hundred years since its publication, there are few characters who can have been as mythologised as Don Quixote. The subject of countless books, plays, performances, statues and works of art, he has been – and continues to be – both a fixture in the popular imagination and an inspiration to the great writers and thinkers of the world.
As the four Folios of Shakespeare are the highest prize of English book-collecting, and the Foligno Dante of Italian, so the early editions Don Quixote printed during of Miguel de Cervantes’s lifetime – are the highest prize of Spanish book-collecting. This edition of the world’s first modern novel is from the library of Jorge Ortiz Linares (1894-1965).
The vase is of exceptional rarity: the only known example of its kind, it was produced by the Jingdezhen workshops for the magnificent courts of the Qianlong Emperor (1735-1796). Famille Rose porcelains of the period (or ‘yangcai’ porcelains, as they are known) are extremely rare on the market, with most examples currently housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and other museums around the world.
