LIVRE TRES RARE de 1638 Traité du Jardinage BOYCEAU, Jacques

Traité du Jardinage BOYCEAU, Jacques

Détails bibliographiques

 

Titre : Traite du Jardinage

Date d'édition : 1638

Reliure : Hardcover

Edition : 1st Edition

THE BEGINNING OF GARDEN DESIGN AS AN ART BOYCEAU, Jacques. Traite du Jardinage, selon les raisons de la nature et de l'art. Divise en trois livres. Ensemble divers desseins de Parterres, Pelouzes, Bosquets et autres ornements servans à l'embellissement des Jardins. [8], 87, [1] pp. Illustrated with an engraved title-page by Van Lochom, engraved portrait of Boyceau after De Vris, 61 plates comprising a total of 79 copper-engraved subjects printed on 36 single-page engraved plates (including one with 2 engravings on the page), 24 double-page engraved plates, and 1 quadruple folding engraved plate, plus numerous engraved head- and tailpieces and large engraved initials, and one half page engraving depicting winds. Folio, 384 x 273mm, bound in eighteenth-century French speckled calf, gilt-tooled compartments on spine, red morocco title-label. Paris: Michel Van Lochom, 1638. First Edition of the first treatise devoted primarily to the pleasure garden. Boyceau offered a new aesthetic approach to garden design and in so doing elevated the metier of garden design into an art. The Traite du Jardinage, published posthumously by his nephew Jacques de Nemours, determined the character of the French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century formal garden that was brought to its climax by André Le Nôtre almost a generation later. The creative significance of Boyceau's book in relation to the history of European garden design cannot be overestimated, as there is no comparable basic statement of principles either for the Italian or English garden, and therefore it remains one of the single most influential works on the art of garden design in Europe. Jacques Boyceau, Sieur de la Barauderie (ca. 1565-ca. 1635) was appointed Intendent des jardins du roi in 1602, and he continued to hold his appointment under Louis XIII after the assassination of Henri IV (in 1610), at which time he was recognized as an authority on garden planning. From the Traité (Privilege, fol. a3v) we know that Boyceau was involved with the gardens at Fontainebleau, although no extant record of his work there exists. The illustrations in the Traité include parterres executed to his designs for the gardens of Marie de Médici at the Luxembourg Palace, the "new" château commissioned by Louis XIII at Versailles, the château-neuf at St. Germain-en-Laye, the Louvre, and the Tuileries. "[Boyceau] planned the new parterres for the Tuileries gardens and his beautiful designs greatly excited the admiration of the next generation. [he] is regarded as the precursor of the great development of French gardening" (Gothein, A History of Garden Art). In general Boyceau's designs are strikingly original; they differ significantly from those of his predecessors (cf. Serlio's Architettura Book IV, Du Cerceau's Plus excellents bastiments, and to a lesser extent Claude Mollet's designs for the Tuileries and St. Germain-en-Laye as depicted in Olivier de Serres' Theatre d'agriculture). Just as Boyceau owed little to his precursors or contemporaries, some of his designs (particularly those of parterres) clearly foreshadow the future, and thus provide an obvious precedent for Le Nôtre and his successors, not only on the Continent but in England as well. Boyceau offered a new aesthetic approach to garden design and in so doing elevated the metier of garden design into an art. Kenneth Woodbridge writes: "[Boyceau's] designs for parterres de broderie in the Traité du Jardinage are the earliest representations of garden decoration in this style, for which reason he has been credited with its invention. Boyceau's book was the first French text to be devoted to pleasure-gardens and their ornament, stressing the importance of variety, not only in the plan and in relief but in the use of sites where there are differences of level" (Oxford Companion to Gardens). The collation of Boyceau's Traite du Jardinage is complex in the extreme; inconsistencies exist among nearly every bibliography. We have collated our copy. N° de réf. du libraire 145376

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