FERRIOL, Charles de (1652-1722, Editor), LE HAY, Jacques (c.1645-1713, Publisher)

Recueil de cent estampes représentant differentes nations du Levant. [With, part two:] Explication des cent estampes qui représentent les costumes des differentes nations du Levant. Avec de nouvelles estampes de ceremonies turques qui ont aussi leurs explications

Paris: Le Hay and Duchange, 1714; Jacques Collombat, 1715. Folio. (19 3/4 x 13 inches). Engraved title, 102 engraved plates (comprising 100 numbered plates and 2 unnumbered, 3 double-page), one leaf of engraved music.

Contemporary red morocco, covers ruled in gilt, spine in eight compartments with raised bands, black morocco lettering piece in the second compartment, the others with an overall repeat decoration in gilt, marbled endpapers (expert restoration to the joints)

Provenance: Jacob Bouverie, 1st Viscount Folkestone (armorial bookplate on verso of the title)

A beautiful copy bound in 18th-century red morocco of the greatest illustrated book of the Ottoman Empire, featuring portraits and scenes of Ottoman life and significantly influencing European perceptions of Ottoman culture and sparking the Turquerie vogue in Rococo art.

The greatest illustrated book of the Ottoman Empire, the Recueil includes portraits and scenes of Ottoman life at the dawn of the Tulip Era after paintings by Jean-Baptiste Van Mour. Van Mour was a Flemish-French painter who studied with Jacques-Albert Gérin (d.1702) and lived in Constantinople from the early-1700s until his death in 1737. One hundred of Van Mour's highly successful paintings were commissioned by the Marquis Charles de Ferriol between 1699 and 1709, while de Ferriol was the French ambassador to the Porte. De Ferriol represented Louis XIV in the Ottoman Empire at Hungary and Constantinople from 1692-1711 during the rule of Sultan Ahmed III. De Ferriol then worked with the artist and publisher Jacques Le Hay to have a roster of well-regarded printmakers execute engravings after Van Mour's paintings, and to publish the resulting collection. The project was so well-received that Van Mour was granted the unique post of "Peintre Ordinaire du Roi en Levant" in 1725. In 1707, Ferriol commissioned Jean Baptiste van Mour to paint one hundred pictures of the Turkish court, nobility, and military, as well as of the distinctive regional, religious, and ethnic identities found in the diverse Empire. These include portraits of the Chief Eunuch; a Turkish man cutting his arm to prove his love for his mistress; Turkish women playing a form of backgammon; Dervishes whirling; an Albanian soldier; and a merchant in a bazaar feeding six cats. Van Mour's paintings, and the plates which were derived from them, show Constantinople as a cosmopolitan cultural center where Muslims and non-Muslims unite in shared Ottoman pleasures. Armenians, Franks, Greeks, and Persians drink coffee, make music, and dance together. The diverse peoples depicted here include Greeks (10); Armenians (5); Barbary Coast (4); Jews (3); Wallachians (3); Albanians (2); Hungarians (2); Bulgarians (2); Persians (2); Indians (2); Crimean Tartars (1); Arabs (1); and Moors (1). The Recueil enjoyed widespread popularity and dissemination and became the "basic prototype for Levantine costume plates." [Atabey] It was in part responsible for the vogue for Turquerie, or European images of Turkish Ottoman life, a form of exoticism popular in the Rococo period, which prefigured the Orientalist craze which would come to dominate much of European painting in the 1800s. The Recueil's use as a sourcebook by artists and publishers of other European texts was rampant. The work was translated into at least five languages, including the German edition printed at Nuremberg in 1719-21, and Italian and Spanish pirated editions. The plates were used by Thomas Jeffreys in his Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations in 1757 and by Viero in his Raccolta, published in Venice in 1783.

Atabey 429; Blackmer 591; Colas 1819-20; Brunet III, 947-8; Cohen-de Ricci 392l; Lipperheide 413, 414.

Item #15885

Price: $12,000.00