The earliest feasibly obtainable French edition, the fourth overall, of the romance of Tristan and Iseult (Isolde), giving Tristan his place among the knights of the Round Table.
Considered the father of the French illustrated book, the Parisian bookseller Antoine Vérard issued four editions of Tristan, the most popular of the chivalric prose romances he published. His first, printed for him by Jean Le Bourgeois of Rouen and dated 30 September 1489, is the editio princeps, but it is not illustrated or decorated. Second and third editions, with illustrations, followed in c.1496 and c.1499. This fourth and last edition is also illustrated, but with some changes. "The same number of large woodcuts is used in the same places in the text, but they are not always the same woodcuts. Some were cropped, others must have worn out entirely, for they were replaced by new ones. In volume one, the combat of knights in the countryside appears again on fol. a1, but at the end of the volume, on fol. y4v, a woodcut originally used in Vérard's edition of Cesar's commentaries of 1488 is surrounded by decorative borders to fill up the requisite space. In volume two, three large woodcuts from Lancelot are re-employed: one of Arthur and Guinevere (fol. A1), another of Arthur and his knights at the Round Table (fol. D6), and a third representing Lancelot at the Douloureuse Garde" (Winn).
Although Pickford estimates that Vérard published some 3,000 copies of Tristan in total, his four editions are all now very scarce, with ISTC recording no more than eleven holding institutions for any one edition. ISTC locates six only for this fourth edition, the British Library the only copy in the United Kingdom, four in France, one in Austria, and none in North America. This is the only copy of any Vérard edition to have appeared in auction in modern times.
Tristan continued to be popular in France through the 16th century, with editions based on Vérard’s published in 1514 and 1520 by Michel Le Noir and in 1533 by Denis Janot. An edition with text updated by Jean Maugin was published in Paris in 1554, reprinted in Lyon in 1577 and in Paris in 1586.
The romance of Tristan and Iseult was probably created on the basis of early Gaelic legends. The Anglo-Norman troubadour Thomas of Britain wrote in French sometime between 1155 and 1170 and his Gaelic legends were already laced with Greco-Latin themes. This tradition gave rise to the German translation of Gottfried von Strassburg. In these early versions, Tristan is the son of Rouland and Blanchefleur. A different tradition was followed by Malory in his Morte d'Arthur, c.1470. In this tradition, Tristan is the son of King Meliodas of Lyonese and of his wife Elizabeth. The present version belongs to this “courtly” branch of the Tristan legend. The preface states that the Knight Luce, lord of the Chateau du Gast near Salisbury in England, has compiled this "authentic history" of the Chevalier Tristan.
Provenance: Armand Cigogne (1860 sale, lot 1814); Jacques-Joseph Techener (1865 sale); Leon Techener (1889 sale, lot 143); Hector de Backer (bookplate; 1926 sale, lot 117); Edmee Maus (bookplate; library dispersed through the French and Swiss trade in the 1970s and 1980s); Christie’s New York, 7 Dec. 2012, lot 89 (catalogued as third French edition).