Le vrai patineur
Rare first edition of the first French treaty dedicated to ice skating.
A beautiful wide-margined copy preserved in its publisher’s wrappers, one of the very few with the 8 plates in contemporary hand-coloring.
12mo of 1 frontispiece, XXIV and 93 pages, 7 plates ; untrimmed, publisher's wrappers.
180 x 105 mm.
Garcin, Jean. Le Vrai Patineur ou principes sur l’art de patiner avec grâce, Précédé de réflexions et de remarques critiques sur la manière de quelques Patineurs inélégans, ainsi que sur les différentes formes de Patins, le choix que l’on doit en faire, et les variations dont cette chaussure est susceptible ; le tout orné de gravures…
Paris, Delespinasse, Delaunay, Nepveu, 1813.
Rare first edition of the first French treaty dedicated to ice skating,
A beautiful copy with the 8 plates in contemporary hand-coloring. (including the frontispiece).
In the 18th century during the brisk winter months, Parisians flocked to the glistening frozen fields of La Glaciére, or the Glacier. The grassy terrain, flooded with water and frozen over, was an icy playground for upper- class citizens. And none were more showy than the male ice skaters dressed in bicep-revealing red jackets, tight pants, and graduation caps. These fraternities of gentlemen showed off with challenging jumps and graceful arm movements charms that could seduce weak mortals, according to the 19th-century French ice skater Jean Garcin. There are no good skaters anywhere but in Paris, he boasted.
During the early 1800s, Jean Garcin was a member of the skating fraternity Gilets Rouge, or red waistcoats, an elite all-male group of skaters who tried to blend masculinity and beauty.
This treatise lays the foundational principles of what is known as "artistic" skating: "It will teach the principles to know all the steps used in skating; to link them together; to execute them gracefully, to guard against certain faults that one might acquire while studying them, and above all, to overcome early on difficulties that seem insurmountable, but are not, to be honest, only due to the lack of a guide to prove otherwise by smoothing them out for us" (p. xxi).
The work concludes with a Vocabulary of technical terms related to the art of skating.
Garcin was a member of the elite Parisian skating fraternity Gilets Rouge and likely wrote the work as a guide for his fellow members.
He dedicated Le vrai patineur to Geniéve Gosselin, the premier dancer at the Academy of Music in Paris, and often employed language used to describe ballet.
A beautiful wide-margined copy preserved in its publisher’s wrappers, one of the very few with colored plates.
