Second known example of the 'Portrait fantaisiste' of the Marquis de Sade.

[Marquis de Sade]. Le Marquis de Sade. De la collection de M.r H*** de Paris. [Brussels?]: “H. Biberstein sc.,” [c. 1860s]. [17.1 x 11.2 cm], [1] f. engraving on thin paper. Wrinkling at left margin and corners, small tears at left margin not affecting image, remnants of mounting on verso. 
 
 
Only the second known copy of the mysterious Portrait fantaisiste (c. 1860s) of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), an engraving that for decades was known only to a handful of connoisseurs, but which later became famous in Sade studies through its countless photographic reproductions. Sade’s true likeness is today known only through a single surviving contemporary drawing, a profile portrait (c. 1760) by Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (1719-95) now preserved in the Jean-Jacques Lebel Collection in Paris. The notorious libertine’s likeness was, however, re-imagined in a handful of 19th-century prints, the most influential of which was this Portrait fantaisiste. 
 
“For many Sade biographers, historians, and textual critics, the Portrait fantaisiste has become the image. They have reproduced it seemingly ad infinitum, perhaps more than any other image of Sade. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Portrait fantaisiste often ornamented, without explanatory captions or other commentary, various new editions of Sade’s writing and related works of literary criticism” (Marson, p. 91). In his illuminating 2013 study, Jann Marson noted that, “The silence surrounding the Portrait fantaisiste has seemingly kept art historians and book history scholars from further investigating the print and thus leaving it shrouded in mystery for more than 150 years” (pp. 90-91). 
 
Marson notes that the celebrated collector/bibliographer of erotica Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900), “donated the Portrait fantaisiste—what appears to be the only extant copy of the print that remains in public collections—to the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings in 1900” (p. 109). The engraving was likely produced in the 1860s in Brussels. It is signed pseudonymously by the fictive engraver “H. Biberstein.” The name of its true designer/printmaker remains unknown. An inscription at the foot of the print reads, “De la collection de M.r H*** de Paris.” Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) reproduced the image of the Portrait fantaisiste (without the inscription) in his 1909 L’Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Bibliotheque des Curieux; plate II, pp. 32-3), and in his brief discussion of the image he sowed misinformation that remained largely unchallenged for more than a century. 
 
Marson convincingly hypothesizes that the image was commissioned as a bookplate or ex-libris leaf for Ashbee’s friend Frederik Hankey (1821-82), a wealthy and dissipated Englishman who spent much of his life in Paris collecting choice erotica, and who, along with Swinburne, “may be considered among the ‘inventors’ of Sade – the devotees who transformed an embarrassing monomaniac of slender literary talents and obnoxious social habits into the Divine Marquis. Ashbee considered Hankey to be ‘a second de Sade without the intellect’” (Kearney, p. 24).
 
“The only extant copy [of the Portrait fantaisiste] to be found in public collections passed from Hankey upon his death in 1882, along with extensive bibliographic notes on the contents of his library, to Ashbee, and finally to the British Museum in 1900 after Ashbee’s death. This relatively private life of the Portrait fantaisiste would account in large part for the fact that reproductions of the print did not appear until well into the twentieth century” (Marson, p. 122).
 
The Portrait fantaisiste depicts the Marquis de Sade in half-length, dressed not as an 18th-century nobleman, but in the simple garb of a post-Revolutionary citoyen or 19th-century Parisian Bohemian. He is surrounded by demons holding serpents and pouring libations. They display a large book and speak or emit rays in an attempt to communicate with or reanimate the writer. At the bottom of the image a satyr straddles a protesting naiad or female sea creature. 
 
 
OCLC and KVK locate only the British Museum example of this print. 
 
*J. Marson, “Bibliography Behaving Badly: The Secret Life of the Portrait fantaisiste du Marquis de Sade,” Book History, vol. 16 (2013), pp. 89-131; P. J. Kearney, Frederick Hankey (1821-1882): A Biographical Sketch.