Hermann und Dorothea. Neue Ausgabe mit vier Kupfern nach Kolbe von Eßlinger. Braunschweig, Friedrich Vieweg, 1822.
The illustrated royal-8vo Prachtausgabe, printed in Antiqua on firm Vélin paper; the Neue Ausgabe following the earlier Vieweg text but incorporating corrections (a coloured-plate variant is also recorded). One preliminary leaf and 239 pp.
With four copperplates after Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Younger, engraved by Martin Esslinger: an engraved frontispiece/title showing Hermann and Dorothea with their children above two Norns, and three further plates in the text.
Signed dark-blue grained-leather Kunsteinband by Karl Ebert, München (the binder's gilt pallet on the lower turn-in), five raised bands, gilt-ruled panels, single gilt fillet border, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers, in a blue-lined slipcase (very good overall; text with light even foxing, binding with minor rubbing and natural patination, slipcase rubbed but functional).
The 1822 Neue Ausgabe is the illustrated royal-8vo issue recorded by the standard Goethe references. It is a cultivated Prachtausgabe whose authority rests as much in its material presentation as in its text, and the plates are central to its ambition. Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Younger, a Berlin historical painter trained under Chodowiecki, supplied the historical-poetic conception; Esslinger, a Swiss engraver active in Zurich, translated it into copperplate, so the formula nach Kolbe von Eßlinger marks a division of artistic labour rather than a minor production note. The imagery suits the poem, which turns the disruptions of the Revolutionary years into a civic and domestic epic of migration, hospitality and moral formation. Kolbe's classical idiom gives those themes a composed dignity within Vieweg's refined page.
Karl Ebert, active in Munich, taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule and was among the founding members of the Meister der Einbandkunst in 1923; his documented collaboration with Frieda Thiersch places him among the Munich artist-binders rather than the trade, and Horst Stobbe's 1919 exhibition catalogue Bucheinbände von Karl Ebert calls him "a craft-artist in the best sense of the word." His binding here is austere in the best sense, with narrow gilt fillets, a raised-band spine and a discreet signature, concentration rather than display.
PROVENANCE
European private collection.
REFERENCES
Goedeke IV/3, 335 (2u); Hagen 257; Kippenberg I, 671; Hirzel A 377; for the coloured-plate variant, Kippenberg I, 672; for the textual corrections, cf. Hewett, p. 133. For Ebert, Horst Stobbe, Bucheinbände von Karl Ebert (Munich, 1919). For the engraver, SIK-ISEA (SIKART), s.v. Martin Esslinger.
