Collins, W. Wilkie, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A., with selections from his journals and correspondence., Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1848

Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A., with selections from his journals and correspondence. By his son, W. Wilkie Collins. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1848. xii, 348 + 32; vi, 354 pp. 8vo. ex library with usual marks. Rebound in tan buckram with gold lettering to spine (including library shelfmark). Oatmeal sprinkled edges. Binding slightly rubbed, hinges tight, foxing to opening pages of each of volume particularly on and around the plates. The frontispiece portrait and title page of vol. 1 both show in their inner margins a crease with a slight crack to the printing. The title page vignette is slightly torn in the outer margin with no loss of material. Vol. I contains an additional numerated 32 pages of advertisements which are browned. Complete with portrait frontispiece and title page vignette in vol. I and title page vignette in vol. II. The vignettes are after William Collins, a successful nineteenth-century painter of landscapes, genre paintings and Biblical scenes. In late nineteenth century, after his death, the work of William Collins was more popular and more highly valued than that of Turner and Constable. This is the first edition of the biography of the artist by his son, Wilkie Collins, the same author famous for his detective novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins wrote this book after his father’s death in 1847, and it is especially important for being his first published book (preceding his first great success, The Woman in White, by eleven years).