Easter Eggs: A Collector’s Guide by Victor Houart lands on the shelves of my shop.
Souvenir Press, 1978, Hardback in dust wrapper.
Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Colour Photographs;
From the cover: Easter Eggs are a comparatively new field for the collector- but Easter Eggs themselves have origins far beyond the Christian festival they have marked for a thousand years. For as Victor Houart points out in this, the first comprehensive guide to Easter Eggs through the ages, the egg is a symbol of the mystery of lifes renewal as old as human culture itself.
The author traces the development of the humble vegetable-dyed eggs hidden by villagers all over Europe even to this day for their children to find on Easter morning, to the magnificent jewel-encrusted creations of Faberge for the Tsar of all the Russias. He describes rare ornamented ostrich eggs preserved in French churches since the middle ages; eggs painted by Boucher, Watteau and Lancret for the 17th-century French court, surprise eggs, containing miniature pastoral scenes of the 18th century; enameled and gold and jeweled eggs, first produced in Paris and later in 19th-century Russia for the Imperial family.
And parallel with this court tradition, the author finds another, the folk tradition of decorating eggs by hand that still survives in Russia (especially in the Ukraine) in Hungary and Rumania and Poland to this day. This tradition perhaps reached its climax in the magnificent 19th-century papier-mâché eggs made in Russia with their rich, glowing colours and folk-rooted designs.
Easter Eggs not only describes the processes by which all these eggs are made but helps the collector to identify place and period of origin. It also places the ancient tradition of the Easter egg in the setting of the folk traditions of the spring in Europe and the Middle East from which the eggs still draw their own unique meaning.
Lavishly illustrated with a series of brilliant plates in colour and black-and-white, this is a book to be treasured and enjoyed.
Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Price Clipped. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper with some short, closed, tears. Pages very gently age-tanned.
Black boards with Silver titling to the Spine. 128 pages. 8¾” x 7″.
Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!
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