Les Jardins Anglo-Chinois

Paris: Chez Le Rouge, Rue des Grands Augustins, 1789. 21 cahiers in 4 vols. Folio. (11 x 8 inches). First edition. Complete. Volume I: Cahiers 1-5: "Traite des edifices, meubles, habits, machines et ustensiles des Chinois, graves sur les originaux dessines a la Chine," 30 pp., 128 copper-plate engravings. Volume 2: Cahiers 6-10: 113 plates. Volume 3: Cahiers 11-15: 111 plates. Volume 4: Cahiers 16-21: 139 plates. 491 plates total with 30 pp. of text as in Royet. On both blue and white laid paper, varying throughout. Contemporary calf, covers bordered in blind, flat spine divided into six gilt compartments, red Morocco lettering piece in the second, volume number in the fifth, in two clamshell boxes backed in brown Morocco with gilt lettering and felt interiors with felt-lined dividers

Provenance: Didier Wirth, founder of the European Institute of Gardens and Landscapes

An exceptionally rare complete set of Le Rouge's monumental work on garden design and decoration: "The most important engraved work concerning the history of European gardens during the 18th century." (Korzus)

Le Rouge's Jardins Anglo-Chinois series, published over fourteen years, is a treasure of "jardinomania," the fervent enthusiasm for Chinese gardens that swept Europe in the eighteenth century. It is the defining printed work of the era on the history of European gardens and the influence of the Anglo-Chinese aesthetic. An all-encompassing panorama that depicts flowerbeds, labyrinths, temples, man-made lakes, amphitheaters, pavilions, ruins, waterfalls, bridges, and aviaries, among other features, Les Jardins Anglo-Chinois includes French gardens such as Versailles and Roissy; English gardens such as Kew and Chiswick; German gardens such as Bagno Park and Würzburg; and most famously, Cahiers 14-17's 99 plates are dedicated to the gardens of the Emperor of China, including the famous Beijing garden the Yuanming Yuan that was destroyed in 1860. While collations of the book's plates differ, and can be seen as variously calling 491, 492, and 493 plates as complete, we believe the count stipulated by Royet's masterful bibliography to be correct, which is 491 as seen on pages 78 and 273. Every plate in Royet is contained in this copy. The thirty-page essay by the Swedish architect William Chambers, which was published in Cahier 5, is here bound-in preceding Cahier 1. The map of Potsdam published in Cahier 3 is here bound-in after Cahier 1 and before Cahier 2. Le Rouge was a famous cartographer, engraver, publisher, and architect. Likely born in Hanover to the French architect Louis Rémy de la Fosse, Le Rouge began his career publishing maps of Darmstadt and Alsace, and while in the service of Maurice of Saxony, a large map of Holland. From 1736 he lived in Paris, where he obtained the position of Ingénieur-géographe du roi for King Louis XV and Louis XVI. Le Rouge began to publish Les Jardins Anglo-Chinois in 1775 and continued the project over a period of fourteen years, incorporating plans, views, and texts often adapted from earlier printed sources, and occasionally from original drawings. Of great import are the detailed plans of a number of gardens that have either disappeared completely or have been altered to the point where the designer's original intentions are no longer evident, such as the garden at Raincy, which now only exists on paper. Perhaps more significant, and typifying the 18th-century vogue for chinoiserie, are the 99 plates of the gardens and palaces of the Qianlong Emperor of China in Cahiers 14 to 17, which are particularly valuable and more carefully executed than the versions published by Chambers. All of these 99 plates were engraved after Chinese woodblock illustrations or paintings, including those dating from 1744 when the emperor commissioned an album of 40 scenes from the painters Shen Yuan and Tang Dai. The album was later copied and given to the Swedish Ambassador in France before serving as a model for Le Rouge. The art historian Bernard Korzus writes of Jardins Anglo-Chinois, "As a whole this publication contains the most complete collection of views of gardens of Anglo-Chinese or any other mode. These images document the history of gardening over an exceptionally long period, from the projects of George Loudon at the start of the 18th century for the alterations to Wanstead, to the gardens of Monceau and Ermenonville." Complete copies of Jardins Anglo-Chinois are of the utmost rarity; the present copy is the most complete available in years. The census of institutional copies, complete and incomplete, in the United States and Europe that is included in Royet's masterly bibliography notes only 25 known copies. Of these, we could locate only nine complete copies, with sixteen incomplete.

Berlin Katalog, 1613. Inventaire du fonds français, Graveurs du XVIIIe siècle XV, 56-72. Ganay, 99. Royet Le Rouge, Les Jardins Anglo-Chinois.