Journal of a Voyage to Brazil,

Scarce hand-coloured copy. A scarce hand-coloured copy of Maria Graham's journal of her time in Brazil, the companion to her account of her time in Chile, in which she explores her complicated relationship with a nation which had only just secured its independence.

Maria Graham (1785-1842) had travelled to Chile in 1821, by way of Brazil, in the company of her husband Captain Thomas Graham aboard HMS Doris under orders to protect British mercantile interests around the vital port of Valparaiso. Thomas died whilst rounding the Horn, and left Maria to fend for herself for two years in Valparaiso, during which time she experienced and recorded the 1822 earthquake. In 1823 she returned to Brazil: in 1821 it had been a territory of Portugal, by her return visit it was an independent nation and still in the midst of a war with the Portuguese. She formed a close friendship with the new Emperor Dom Pedro I and the empress Maria Leopoldina of Austria, agreeing to become tutor to their daughter Maria da Gloria. She returned to London in 1823 only with enough time to publish her accounts of South America before returning in 1824 to Brazil to take up her role as royal tutor. She did not last a year in the job, ousted by royal courtiers who feared she intended to Anglicise the princess, and returned to Britain for good in 1825.

Graham was an accomplished painter, moving in the same circles as Constable and Turner, and took for her second husband the landscape painter Sir Augustus Wall Callcott. She drew most of the plates in this work herself, mixing landscapes with views of Brazilian slave markets, and dedicated a section to Maria Quitéria, a national heroine who disguised herself in soldier's clothes to fight in the war of independence, for whom the engraving in this work remains the standard depiction.

First edition; 4to (28 x 22 cm); 11 hand-coloured aquatint plates, 9 wood engravings in the text, additional hand-coloured wood-engraved vignette to title, discreet bookbinder's ticket, a couple of nicks to plate margins otherwise internally fine; contemporary full diced calf, gilt and blind borders to boards, gilt spine in six compartments with gilt morocco lettering piece, joints expertly refurbished, later endpapers, a little minor wear to extremities, otherwise a fine copy; vi, [2], 335, [1]pp.

Abbey (Travel), 708; Robinson (Wayward Women), p44; Sabin, 28235.