VERGNAUD, Narcisse (1794-1848)
L'Art de créer les jardins, contenant les préceptes généraux de cet art; leur application développée sur des vues perspectives, coupes et élévations, par des exemples choisis dans les jardins les plus célèbres de France et d'Angleterre; et le tracé pratique de toute espèce de jardins...Nouvelle Edition
Paris: Librairie Encyclopédique de Roret, 1839. Folio. (19 x 12 ½ inches). [6], iv, 5-106 pp. Illustrated with 24 hand-coloured lithographed plates illustrating the designs and plans of estate parks and gardens in France and England (eight double-page or folding, five with tipped overlay flaps).
Contemporary calf-backed red cloth boards with richly gilt spine
A beautifully hand-coloured copy of the 'Nouvelle édition' of Vergnaud's manual of landscape design, combining garden theory with measured plans, perspective views, sections, and elevations drawn from celebrated European parks.
Vergnaud's L'Art de créer les jardins belongs to a distinct moment in nineteenth-century garden literature, when the picturesque landscape garden was increasingly treated through the combined disciplines of architecture, horticulture, drawing, and site analysis. First published by Roret in 1835, the work appeared again in this "Nouvelle édition" in 1839, with the same large format and an extensive suite of lithographed plates. Vergnaud presents the creation of gardens as an architectural art grounded in the study of terrain, water, planting, views, and circulation. The text moves from general principles to practical application, addressing the selection and study of a site, the nature of soils and water, the use of plans and levels, the organisation of walks and plantations, and the pictorial handling of natural and built features. Vergnauds emphasis falls on composition in the full sense: the garden as a designed landscape whose effects depend on time, growth, perspective, and the intelligent adjustment of architecture to nature. The plates include plans, views, and details drawn from major English landscapes such as Blenheim, Chatsworth, Stowe, Windsor, Richmond, Longleat, and Wilton, together with French examples including Morfontaine, Saint-Leu, Beauregard, Marly-le-Roi, and Bougival. The suite also includes views from Ermenonville and the gardens of the Pitti Palace, greenhouse details in France and England, plans for public promenades and gardens, and the plan of the farm at Aubetin. Several plates use folding or overlay elements to clarify changes of level, layout, or design sequence, making the volume especially valuable as a practical visual manual. Narcisse Vergnaud was born in Orléans and trained in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer. Active in Paris as an architect and designer of gardens, Vergnaud is now often obscured in catalogues under the name Nicolas Vergnaud, though contemporary and modern authority records identify him as Narcisse. His treatise places him within the French reception of English landscape gardening while retaining a strongly architectural understanding of design, one in which plan, elevation, perspective, horticulture, and execution form part of a single discipline. Very rare. We can trace only one other coloured copy, last offered in London in 1935.
De Ganay 220; Berlin Katalog 3313.
Item #42547
Price: $12,000.00