MONSON (John Frederick), HAGUE (Louis) and GILLY (William Stephen). Views in the Department of the Isère and the high Alps. London, W. H. Dalton, 1840. In full, bound in red half-chagrin with corners, spine ribbed, gilt title on spine and first board. Many loose leaves. Illustrated with a coloured frontispiece, a map and 21 hors-texte plates, lithographed by Louis Hague after John Frederick Monson and remarkably coloured at the time. A superb album of views of the Dauphiné region intended to illustrate W. S. Gilly's "A memoir of Felix Neff, pastor of the high Alps". Although very few earlier illustrations of the Dauphiné Alps exist, the views chosen by Lord Monson were taken up by the illustrators who followed him over the following decades. Of the 21 lithographs, 17 illustrate landscapes in the Hautes-Alpes, in particular Oisans, Briançonnais, Queyras and Champsaur. Each plate, protected by a serpente, is preceded by a caption leaflet in English and French. The 16-page, two-column introductory text is in English and French. The rare copies that were coloured at the time were broken up to sell the engravings separately, and it is almost impossible to find a complete copy today. Some foxing in the margins of a few plates. Baron Frederick John Monson, fifth of the name (London 1809 - Brighton 1841), was an artist. After studying at Oxford, he travelled around Europe, mainly in France and Italy, in search of works of art, and visited the Alps, particularly the Protestant valleys of the Dauphiné, moved by the peregrinations of the Vaudois led by the pastor Félix Neff in the high Alpine valleys. He brought back the beautiful drawings published a year before his death in the album described here. Louis Haghe (Tournai 1806 - London 1885), who came from a family of architects in Belgium, took up watercolour painting at an early age, and then the art of lithography while still in his teens. He moved to England in 1823, where in 1830 he and William Day founded a publishing house specialising in lithography. He was President of the Society of Watercolour Painters of London from 1873 to 1884. Perret, 1935 - Regards sur les Alpes 57 - Abbey 60