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James Fenimore Cooper, 16 June 1831
Details
An extract from Bravo
James Fenimore Cooper, 16 June 1831
COOPER, James Fenimore (1789-1851). Autograph manuscript signed ("J. Fenimore Cooper"), a 30-line "Extract from 'Bravo,' an unfinished tale," comprising about 400 words in his hand, Paris, 16 June 1831.
One page, 221 x 178mm (left margin rough, mild soiling at lower margin).
A passage from Cooper's The Bravo, A Venetian Story. An extended extract which Cooper very probably copied for an unknown admirer. Cooper identifies it at the bottom of the sheet as "Chapter VI. vol. I. copied from proof sheet..." The text is a description of one of the principal characters in Cooper's convoluted romance set in Renaissance Venice. Venetian Senator Gradenigo, he writes, was "born with all the sympathies and natural kindliness of other men, but accident, and an education which received a strong bias from the institutions of the self styled republic, had made him the creature of a conventional polity...In short, he was an aristocrat; and no man had more industriously or more successfully persuaded himself into the belief of all the dogmas of his caste..." The excerpt varies slightly in several places from the text of the novel's first publication in 1831. Through his European romances, including The Bravo, Cooper attempted to bring "American opinion...to bear on European facts" (DAB); it was however, poorly received by critics. Provenance: Christie's, New York, 14 December 2000, lot 45.
James Fenimore Cooper, 16 June 1831
COOPER, James Fenimore (1789-1851). Autograph manuscript signed ("J. Fenimore Cooper"), a 30-line "Extract from 'Bravo,' an unfinished tale," comprising about 400 words in his hand, Paris, 16 June 1831.
One page, 221 x 178mm (left margin rough, mild soiling at lower margin).
A passage from Cooper's The Bravo, A Venetian Story. An extended extract which Cooper very probably copied for an unknown admirer. Cooper identifies it at the bottom of the sheet as "Chapter VI. vol. I. copied from proof sheet..." The text is a description of one of the principal characters in Cooper's convoluted romance set in Renaissance Venice. Venetian Senator Gradenigo, he writes, was "born with all the sympathies and natural kindliness of other men, but accident, and an education which received a strong bias from the institutions of the self styled republic, had made him the creature of a conventional polity...In short, he was an aristocrat; and no man had more industriously or more successfully persuaded himself into the belief of all the dogmas of his caste..." The excerpt varies slightly in several places from the text of the novel's first publication in 1831. Through his European romances, including The Bravo, Cooper attempted to bring "American opinion...to bear on European facts" (DAB); it was however, poorly received by critics. Provenance: Christie's, New York, 14 December 2000, lot 45.
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Heather Weintraub
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