What do you see on this picture? Well, there is a legend beneath telling us what exactly it is (Cascade de Saint Cloud) but for most of you the name of the place does not say very much. What you see is a cascade in a beautiful park à la…
Royal Vessel
This magnificent print of the late 17th century represents a detailed description of a royal vessel (Navir Royal) with all its accessories and adornments. It is also accompanied at the bottom with a little cute poem extolling its virtues and wonders. Here it is in original French with an English…
Discreet Charm of Imitation
It is not always easy to separate my collector’s persona from the decorator’s one but it is a necessary choice if one does not want to turn one’s home into a museum. We want our home to be a liveable and comfortable space, which is not a quality we associate…
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Perronet
This magnificently bound album in two volumes dates to 1782-83. It contains detailed plans for some major engineering and architectural projects undertaken in France in the last years before the Revolution. The album is dedicated to the king, Louis XVI, by its author Jean Rodolphe Perronet, the chief royal engineer…
Maps
I explained in Engraving and Photography: continuity or disruption? the reasons for excluding from my collection any coloured prints. Even though they may catch an unsophisticated viewer’s eye, the manual addition of colours actually diminishes the value of prints, both in terms of accuracy and in aesthetic terms (for me…
Plan Turgot
This spectacular bird’s eye view or plan of Paris of early 18th century, popularly known as Plan Turgot (by the name of the Paris prévôt des marchands who ordered it), is probably the most famous plan of Paris, or any other city for that matter, ever made. It was the…
Engraving and Photography: continuity or disruption?
What do we know about the past, the one before we were born? Of course, there are books on history, memoirs, paintings, monuments and other objects surviving from the past and giving us some idea of what it was like to live at that time. However, they never give us…
