NODIER Charles Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d’un cœur souffrant.

Clouzot, 225 (‘rare’); Vicaire, VI, 88; Quérard, VI, 424. Not in Carteret.

First edition of this romantic novel published by the young Nodier (1780-1844) at the age of 23.

Le Peintre de Saltzbourg is Nodier’s second novel, preceded by Stella ou Les Proscrits (1802). It contains the fictional diary of Charles Munster. ‘It was above all thanks to two novels – heavily influenced by Goethe’s Werther – Les Proscrits (1802) and Le Peintre de Salzbourg, journal des émotions d’un cœur souffrant (1803), that he became famous as a writer of desperate loves and sentimental outpourings’ (Larousse, dictionnaire mondial des littératures).

With Le Peintre de Saltzbourg (The Saltzburg Painter), Nodier delivers a novel in which Romantic and Gothic themes mingle within the same story. The author explores the impossible love between Eulalie and his character Charles Munster. Charles Munster is not only a cursed artist, he is also banished, adding to his despair. The gloomy and the fateful come together in many passages, some of which seem directly borrowed from Lewis’s Monk: ‘William […] spread his black robe over this lifeless body, wrapped it up, loaded it on his shoulders, and returned to the monastery.’

The engraved frontispiece enhances these elements. It shows Eulalie, the sad fiancée, drawing seated on a grave. The atmosphere of the cemetery is enhanced in particular with the repulsive element of the cross at the bottom left of the composition. It all adds up to an image prized by the Romantics: the coming together of art and death. Although the text seems to have had little impact when it was first published in 1803, this was not the case with its subsequent editions, no doubt helped by the context of a more legitimate Romanticism. The text first appeared in 1820, then in Nodier’s Oeuvres in 1832, a year after Balzac’s success with Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu, containgin some similar themes.

A very fine copy with full margins, complete with the engraving.