New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, (1888). Folio 405 x 305 mm). In publisher's original full white cloth with gilt lettering to spine and a gilt portrait of Rembrandt to front board. Upper edge gilt, outer and lower edge uncut. Binding with wear and corner bumped, with some loss of the cloth. Cloth with tears and and cloth on front hinge detached. Front hinges weak. (24) pp. + 50 numbered photogravure plates, each preceded by title leaf and followed by description.
A rare first edition of Curtis’s important study of Rembrandt’s most notable etchings, illustrated with fifty photogravure plates. Issued after the author’s 1883 descriptive catalogue of Velasquez and Murillo, this work opens with a biographical introduction asserting that an appreciation of Rembrandt’s etched oeuvre is essential to true artistic cultivation: “No test of one's taste and higher cultivation is more sure than the love for and capacity of appreciating these marvelous works. (…) If we may judge from the past, there is nothing whose value is more sure than the etchings of Rembrandt.” (From the introduction to the present work). Each of the fifty plates is accompanied by a title leaf and followed by detailed historical and descriptive commentary.