Le jardin d'Eden, : le paradis terrestre renouvellé dans le jardin de la Reine à Trianon ou collection des plantes les plus rares, qui se trouvent dans les deux hémispheres. ... / par Mr. Buc'hoz ...
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz (1731-1807)
Category
Books
Date
1783
Materials
Place of origin
Paris
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3101489
Summary
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz, Le Jardin d'Eden, le Paradis Terrestre renouvellé dans le Jardin de la Reine à Trianon, Paris: chez l'auteur, 1783. Binding: Eighteenth-century full mottled sheep over boards; spine gilt; red morocco spine label with title ‘Buchoz. Jardin d’Eden’; sewn on six raised bands; red edges; marbled endpapers.
Full description
The second half of the eighteenth century saw a boom in natural history publication in France, fuelled by such works as Buffon's 'Histoire naturelle' and Brisson's 'Ornithologie'. The accession of Louis XVI in 1774 was followed by a relaxation in the regulation of the book trade, making it easier for authors to publish their own works. No other writer was to take such copious advantage of these two developments as Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz. Born in Metz in 1731, Buc'hoz initially trained as a lawyer, but later changed to medicine. He developed a particular interest in botany, collecting plants for the botanical garden of the exiled King Stanislas I of Poland in Nancy, and becoming 'démonstrateur royal en botanique'. His first botanical work, 'Traité historique des Plantes qui croissent dans la Lorraine et les trois Évêchés' appeared in ten volumes from 1762 to 1770; it was originally projected to run to 20. Forced out of his position by hostile criticism after Stanislas's death, Buc'hoz moved to Paris and began publishing in earnest. A work on political economy was admired by the mathematician d'Alembert, but Buc'hoz is best remembered, though not generally revered, for his botanical works. In this field his output was prodigious. "Il compilait, compilait, compilait," the lexicographer Larousse complained in 1867. "Il écrit sur toutes les parties de l'histoire naturelle, sans y rien comprehendre" ("he writes on every type of natural history, without understanding any of them"). The nineteenth-century German botanist Georg August Pritzel called Buc'hoz "fraude ac ignorantia aeque eminens scritor ... [qui] per semiseculum ultra 500 volumina consarcinavit" ("a writer as well known for his fraudulence as for his ignorance, who over half a century cobbled together more than 500 volumes"). Nonetheless his 'Histoire naturelle du Règne végétal' was approved by the Académie des Sciences, which, however, twice rejected its author for membership. An encyclopedic work arranged alphabetically, the 'Histoire' ran to 13 volumes of text and 12 of plates, and stopped at the letter P, following the bankruptcy of two of its publishers. Henceforth Buc'hoz was generally to publish his own works. The unctuously titled 'Jardin d'Eden' is typical of the books Buc'hoz published in the 1780s. It consists of 200 hand-coloured plates in two volumes. There is no text, apart from the title pages, captions to the plates in Latin and French and two pages of index. Buc'hoz habitually drew on other works to maintain his rate of production, and here he borrows illustrations from Nicolaas Meerburgh's 'Afbeeldingen van zeldzaane gewassen' (1775), Christoph Jakob Trew's 'Plantæ selectæ' (1750-73) and others. There is no discernible system to the order in which the plates appear, and the compiler, following his usual practice, names several plants after his patrons or potential patrons. Buc'hoz's formula does not appear to have been particularly successful in gaining him either respect or wealth. In 1788 he had to sell his library, and he was awarded a pension (on the second application) by the Assemblée nationale in 1794, two years after the gardens of the Petit Trianon had been dispersed. As a work of scholarship 'Le Jardin D'Eden' may be negligible but it is undeniably impressive as a collection of botanical illustrations, and now serves as a record of a lost garden and a testimony to the botanical interests of wealthy amateurs outside the circles of the learned. Text adapted from William Hale's entry in 'Treasures from Lord Fairhaven's Library at Anglesey Abbey', 2013, cat. 12, pp. 66-7.
Bibliographic description
2 v., 200 leaves of plates : ill. ; fol. Incomplete copy? Plates I-CXL only, bound in 1 vol. Plates are hand-coloured. Provenance: Twentieth-century armorial bookplate, signed G.S. 24 [i.e. 1924]: Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton [i.e. Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966)]. Binding: Eighteenth-century full mottled sheep over boards; spine gilt; red morocco spine label with title ‘Buchoz. Jardin d’Eden’; sewn on six raised bands; red edges; marbled endpapers.
Provenance
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
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz (1731-1807) , author