Picturesque tour of the Seine, from Paris to the sea: : with particulars historical and descriptive. / By M. Sauvan. ; Illustrated with twenty-four highly finished and coloured engravings, from drawings by A. Pugin and J. Gendall; and accompanied by a map.
Jean-Baptiste-Balthazar Sauvan (b.1780)
Category
Books
Date
1821
Materials
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3069953
Summary
Jean-Baptiste-Balthazar Sauvan, A Picturesque Tour of the Seine, London: published by R. Ackermann, 1821. Binding: Twentieth-century full brown morocco over boards; gilt spine title; double gilt fillet on board edges; gilt textblock edges; elaborately gilt tooled doublures; red watered-silk endpapers. Binder's stamp: Bound by Zaehnsdorf, London, England.
Full description
Just as Napoleon's final defeat and exile focused international attention on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, so the fall of the emperor and the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 allowed English tourists to explore France for the first time since the short-lived Peace of Amiens of 1802-3. Louis XVIII had been in exile at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire and was a great Anglophile, but not all of his fellow countrymen shared his feelings, and by the autumn of 1814 the hoards of English visitors and the overbearing behaviour of the British ambassador, the Duke of Wellington, were reportedly beginning to grate on the Parisians. Secret service reports sent to the king revealed that it was 'la gloire de Wellington' that above all else annoyed former Napoleonic loyalists like Marshal Ney, who was to go back to his old master when Napoleon returned for the final gamble of the Hundred Days - only to be shot for treason after the duke's final victory at Waterloo in June 1815. Louis XVIII was also a great book collector, and he was the dedicatee of this splendid volume of hand-coloured aquatints. Like many such books it was a collaborative effort, published by Ackermann and available from his shop in the Strand, the text by Sauvan, and the yet more crucial plates by the firm's in-house engravers Thomas Sutherland (1785-1838) and Daniel Havell (1785-1826) after original material by John Gendall (1791-1865) and the French emigré artist Auguste Charles Pugin (1762-1832). Pugin had grown up in pre-revolutionary France and fled the Revolution in 1792, becoming architectural draftsman to John Nash (1752-1835) and contributing many of the illustrations for, among others, Ackermann's books onOxford (1814), Cambridge (1815), and the great public schools (1816). William Gilpin had, of course, published his 'Observations on the River Wye', the founding text of the Picturesque movement, as far back as 1782, but by 1821 spectacular coloured books on the journeys of rivers - though exciting and novel - were by no means unprecedented. Ackermann had already issued 'A Picturesque Tour on the Rhine' (1820), and would go on to produce books on the Thames (1828) and the Meuse (1835), as well as - more exotically - the Ganges and the Jumna (1824), and the Niger (1840). But Gendall and Pugin's illustrations along the Seine would have had a further resonance in the 1820s, and one which would not have been lost on thoughtful contemporaries. Many of the great Gothic buildings of northern France had been badly damaged during the French Revolution, converted into Temples of Reason during the Terror, or otherwise brutalised; the 28 medieval statues of the kings of Israel and Judah on the west front of Notre Dame in Paris - a building which features prominently in Ackermann's illustrations of the French capital - were famously wrecked by the revolutionaries in 1793. By 1821 all this was in the past, and for its authors and purchasers, 'A Picturesque Tour on the Seine' was surely as much about the growing veneration of the medieval past and, implicitly, the rejection of the Revolution and all it had stood for, as it was about the sights that were to be seen along the river. Exactly a decade later, Victor Hugo was to publish his famous medievalist novel 'Notre-Dame de Paris' (1831), and in 1843 the pioneering Gothicist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79) submitted his plans for the restoration of the cathedral. Across the Channel, and at much the same time, Auguste Charles Pugin's son Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) had by then already published 'Contrasts' (1836), an impassioned polemic on the depravity of modern life and buildings and the transcendent beauty of the Catholic Middle Ages; he would go on to be the most pungent propagandist of the Gothic Revival in England. Text adapted from Mark Purcell's entry in 'Treasures from Lord Fairhaven's Library at Anglesey Abbey', 2013, cat. 31, pp. 104-5.
Bibliographic description
viii., 177, [1] p., 25 leaves of plates : col. ill. (aquatints), map ; fol. Loosely inserted: typed book dealer's catalogue entry, without price; typescript catalogue card. Provenance: Twentieth-century armorial bookplate large variant, signed Badeley 1930: Urban Huttleston Rogers Lord Fairhaven [i.e.: Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966)]. Twentieth-century pictorial bookplate of G. R. Nicolaus, signed R. O. 1929. J & E.B. Nicolaus's gilt blue monogram label also on pastedown: G. R. N. Binding: Twentieth-century full brown morocco over boards; gilt spine title; double gilt fillet on board edges; gilt textblock edges; elaborately gilt tooled doublures; red watered-silk endpapers. Binder's stamp: Bound by Zaehnsdorf, London, England.
Provenance
Armorial bookplate of G.R. Nicolaus, 1929; sold, Sotheby's, 7 June 1944, 'the Property of a Gentleman'. Acquired by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) and then bequeathed by him to the National Trust with the house and the rest of the contents in 1966.
Makers and roles
Jean-Baptiste-Balthazar Sauvan (b.1780), author Augustus Charles Pugin (Normandy c.1762 - England 1832), artist John Gendall (Exeter 1790 - Exeter 1865), artist Thomas Sutherland (1785-1838), engraver (printmaker) Daniel Havell (Berkshire 1785 – 1826), engraver (printmaker) Rudolph Ackermann (1764 - 1834) , publisher