An early and beautiful exercise in the salvage of European folk culture. Estella Canziani — an Anglo-Italian painter trained under Byam Shaw — travelled through the mountain valleys of Savoy, the borderland of France, Switzerland and Italy, recording in paint the costume, songs, festivals and beliefs of a peasant world already passing.
The fifty colour plates after her pictures make the book both an ethnographic document and an Arts-and-Crafts-era object in its own right, of the kind she would continue in her more famous Piedmont (1913).
xiv, 179, [1] pp. With fifty reproductions of the author's own pictures and line drawings. Quarto, blue cloth stamped in gold, red, white and green.
Very good. Rubbing at the extremities, rear joint starting and rear hinge cracked, some soiling to the cloth and internally, a few plates creased. Sound and attractive, the colour plates bright.
First edition
