Bidspirit auction | australie

australie - BEAUVOIR (Le Comte de) AUSTRALIE: Voyage Autour du Monde . Ouvrage enrichi de cartes et de photographies. Paris: Henri Plon, 1869. x, 364 pp., 2 mapas, 12 gravs.: il.; 180 mm. The first edition of this remarkable work of 19th-century travel literature, which documents the journey of the young French aristocrat Ludovic de Beauvoir through Australia during his 1865–67 trip around the world. With a curious perspective that is at once marked by the European sensibility of the time, Beauvoir offers vivid descriptions of Victorian cities, the gold mines of Ballarat and Bendigo, the Australian countryside and the indigenous peoples, complemented by engravings and folding maps. This account, which quickly went through several editions and translations, constitutes an important iconographic and ethnographic source of colonial Australia and a representative piece of the romantic and imperial vision of the “exotic” in the 19th-century European imagination. ! Please note that this translated text was generated by Google. !