CHÉRON, Elizabeth Sophie Essay de Pseaumes mis en vers. Paris Michel Brunet 1694
4to [19 x 12 cm], (7) ff. consisting of half title, engraved portrait (unsigned), engraved frontispiece, title and dedication; 115 (1) pp., with 24 full-page engraved plates signed Louis Chéron. Bound with BAUDERON DE SÉNECÉ, Antoine trans. BOUTARD, François. Ode Françoise de Mr De Sence, mise en Latin par Mr Boutard sur La Traduction des Pseaumes e vers De Mademoiselle Cheron. 13 pp., (1) blank p. Bound in later calf, preserving original gilt spine, with red morocco title label; lower margin of portrait discolored; blank margin of plate opposite p. 37 extended where dog-earred (no loss), and plate proper has some light browning in margin; tiny waterstain in upper blank margin of scattered leaves; worm holes not affecting text or plates. Generally good, with the plates in good impression.
Rare first and only edition of Elizabeth Chéron’s verse translation of psalms, the work which led to her election into the Paduan Accademia dei Ricovrati. Published more than 20 years after her election to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, it established her reputation as one of France’s most accomplished polymaths. “We know from Titon du Tillet that the great success of her Essay de pseaumes et cantiques was partially due to the fact that she had studied Hebrew so as to get as close as possible to understanding the fine points of the text. Her brother Louis made the engravings that accompany each of the paraphrases, even if not all editions included them.” (Fontijn-Harris) The present copy also includes an Ode on Chéron by Bauderon de Sénecé, with the Latin translation by Boutard alongside the original French. Although it is not integral to the work, we have located other copies (BN) which appear to have it. “If one were to imagine a female counterpart to the ‘Renaissance man,’ a person able to excel simultaneously in several diverse domains, Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648-1711) would satisfy the requirement. The talents that she demonstrated in art, music, and literature were rewarded in her lifetime by a nomination to two academies, as well as by a pension from Louis XIV that crowned her final years. She was named a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1672, after having presented her self-portrait as her morceau de réception under the protection of the painter Charles Le Brun. “With the publication of her book of psalm paraphrases in 1694, the Essay de pseaumes et cantiques mis en vers, et enrichis de figures, her literary talent came to the attention of the Paduan Accademia dei Ricovrati, to which she was named a member in 1699. Given the academician name of “Erato,” after the muse of lyric and love poetry, Chéron joined the ranks of the eight other female “muses” of the academy of the Ricovrati, limited in their number—by classical dictates—to nine. (Claire Fontijn-Harris, “Cheron” on GoldbergNet.com) “Even if Chéron did not actually compose music, her psalm paraphrases provided the texts for compositions penned by at least two composers. The musicologist Thierry Favier recently matched a setting of Psalm 68 by Jean-Baptiste Drouart de Bousset (1662-1725) with Chéron’s paraphrased verse. Bousset set the psalm as an air spirituel for treble voice and basso continuo and had it published by the Ballard printers in 1701. The second composer, Antonia Bembo (c. 1640-c. 1720)—a Venetian noblewoman who had been living in France since the mid-1670s—set all seven “Pseaumes de la Pénitence,” which had been grouped together in one section of the Essay. In the 1930s Yvonne Rokseth discovered that Chéron’s texts matched Bembo’s work, entitled Les sept Pseaumes de David. It seems quite possible that Bembo and Chéron could have been acquainted, given that both were on the king’s pension rolls, both were Parisian residents involved in music-making, and that Chéron had become a member of an academy based in Bembo’s homeland, the Veneto. Bembo’s complete penitential psalm settings-for 1-4 voices, all with the accompaniment of two obbligato treble parts with basso continuo-may represent something of a collaborative effort and could conceivably have been performed in Chéron’s salon.” (ibid)Bauderon de Sénecé (1643-1737) was a poet from Mâcon, who spent much of his career exiled in Italy and Spain. Louis Chéron (1660-1725) won the Prix de Rome in 1676 and 1678. “As a Protestant, some time in the 1690s he chose to exile himself to England. There he was patronized by Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu, for whom he decorated the ceilings of the saloon and staircase at Boughton House, Northants, with mythological scenes depicting the Assembly of the Gods and the Judgement of Paris (in situ). These paintings, his most important surviving works, show his debt to Charles Le Brun and, more particularly, to François Verdier.” (Grove Dictionary of Art)
OCLC: Florida, Harvard, Illinois, La Salle, Newberry, Stanford. 1715 edition at Maryland, Tulane, UCLA.*Brunet 1834 (calling for 23 plates); BNF record.
Chadwick, Whitney, Women, Art and Society, p.65; Fontijn-Harris, Claire, “Chéron,” GoldbergNet.com; Greder, Léon. Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron. Paris, Jouve, 1909.
$US4500
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