DUPRÉ (Louis). Voyage à Athènes et à Constantinople, ou collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes grecs et ottomans, peints sur les lieux, d'après nature, lithographiés et coloriés. Paris, Dondey-Dupré, 1825. Large folio (61 x 47 cm), black half-chagrin, gilt title on upper board, smooth spine decorated with cold fillets, smooth edges (period binding). Extremely rare first edition of one of the finest works ever published on Greece and the Ottoman Empire, published in ten monthly issues, the last of which appeared in 1838. It includes a travel report illustrated with 12 large black lithographed vignettes based on drawings by Louis Dupré, a double-page facsimile of a Turkish passport lithographed in colour, and a suite of 40 spectacular plates of Greek and Turkish views, portraits and costumes, drawn by the same artist from life in 1819, lithographed in two tones and magnificently coloured with a brush. "Probably the most beautiful [book] ever produced on Greece and Turkey" (Blackmer). A pupil of David, the painter and lithographer Louis Dupré (1789-1837) was Jérôme Bonaparte's boarder in Rome. He travelled to Greece in 1819, from Corfu to Athens, where he was received by Fauvel, the French consul, and other philhellenes. He visited Thessaly and embarked for Constantinople, before returning via Romania and Italy in the company of the Moldavian prince Michel Soutzo. An exceptional first edition copy (with plates 30 and 31 incorrectly numbered), complete and in brilliant period colours. From the illustrious collection of Anatole Demidoff (1812-1870), a Russian diplomat, industrialist, patron and collector, titled Prince of San Donato by Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany, with bookplate and library stamp of his Florentine palace of San Donato (1880, no. 5935). He was married to Princess Mathilde (1820-1904), daughter of Jérôme Bonaparte, niece of Napoleon I and cousin of Napoleon III. Freckling and spotting in the text, tear repaired on p. 43, a few rare plates uniformly freckled or spotted, minor rubbing and spotting to the binding. Atabey, n°381 - Blackmer, n°517 - Colas, n°916 - Weber, I, 130 - Droulia, 901.