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More imagesLes Arts au Moyen Age : en ce qui concerne principalement le Palais romain de Paris, l'Hôtel de Cluny, issu de ses ruines, et les objets d'art de la collection classée dans cet hôtel.First edition of the plate volumes. Complete in 6 volumes.
Du Sommerard, Alexandre, (1779-1842); Du Sommerard, E. (Edmond), (1817-1885), EDITORS; Guichard; Ed. Robert; Fragonard père; Jacquand; C.L. Maufras; Victor Petit; V. de Sansonetti; H. Petit; Louis Boulanger; Lesaint, ARTISTS; J. Engelmann; Lemercier; A. Godard; Coulon & Cie, C. Motte; Edmond de Sommerand; Aubert, LITHOGRAPHERS; Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden = M. C. D. Borden ( 1842- 1912), PROVENANCE
Published by Paris: Hôtel de Cluny,1838-46 1838
- Hardcover
Seller: Wittenborn Art Books, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.Wittenborn Art Books
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Condition: Good. Folio. 35 x 53.25cm. sheet size with pages attached to hinges for an effective width of 38cm. 6 plate volumes uniformly bound in full green morocco with elaborate gilt border designs; gilt inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. .VERY HEAVY VOLUMES.10 plate albums bound in 5, plus the plate atlas alb…um. With 508 lithographed plates (400 in the albums, frontispiece portrait & 107 in the atlas), many printed in color or hand-colored, others black & white or sepia; color lithographed title pages for the atlas and the albums, except for the title page of the tenth part, which is not present and perhaps never published. Plain paper interleaves to the plates. Some of the plates are chromolithographs but most of the colored plates are richly handcolored and gommés. Sixty artists worked on the lithographs.References: Brunet II, 920."ouvrage splendide et d'un grand intérêt"; OCLC Number / Unique Identifier: 1110334971.Dunbarton Oaks:Like his family before him, Alexandre Du Sommerard (1779-1842) had a career in public service, first in the military, then in the civil service, then in the court itself. Passion for his native country of France was even more manifest in his art collecting and studies, which is where he directed most of his energies.The first items he acquired were paintings by contemporary French painters, but, after 1825, he devoted himself to art from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, with particular attention to arts with French connections. In his actions and his collector's tastes, Sommerard was likely influenced by Alexandre Lenoir (1761-1839), who rescued medieval treasures and monuments from destruction during the French Revolution and who later set up the Musée des Monuments Français.By 1832, Sommerard had accumulated such a large collection that he purchased the late fifteenth-century Hôtel des Abbés de Cluny to house it. In each room of the building, he arranged furniture, objects, and textiles according to their function or symbolic value in an attempt to replicate the interior spaces of the past.In 1838, Alexandre Du Sommerard published the first volumes of a multivolume work, Les Arts du moyen-âge, which he intended as a history of French medieval art. His collection and study included early Christian and Byzantine art as the precursors to western medieval art. He felt that history should not rely solely on written sources and that historians and the public needed to comprehend the history of art as well.The illustrated atlas and album were issued serially, 10 installments in all and each with a beautiful, unique title page. Inside each installment were large illustrations of medieval buildings and objects. In the Avertissement, Sommerard brags that the publication used lithography, the most advanced technique in book illustration available at the time, in order to create accurate reproductions. At this point, chromolithography was still in development, and most lithographic illustrations were black-and-white, so it seems likely that the rich colors in Sommerard's publication were added manually.Upon his death in 1842, his collection and the building were bequeathed to the state. In 1844, Lenoir's son, Alexandre-Albert Lenoir (1801-1891), oversaw the movement of his father's collection to Roman baths that are immediately adjacent to the Hôtel de Cluny. The combined collections became the Musée de Cluny (now the Musée National du Moyen Âge). Edmond du Sommerard (d. 1855) was appointed the museum's first curator and was responsible for the acquisition of the museum's famous lady-and-unicorn tapestries. Since then, some items have been deaccessioned and moved to other museums, but the existing museum still reflects the ideas and tastes of Sommerard and Lenoir.Alexandre Du Sommerard a mobilisé près de soixante artistes pour créer les cinq cents planches d'illustrations lithographiques des Arts au Moyen Âge.Dès ses débuts, Alexandre a montré un intérêt marqué pour cette technique, l'ayant déja? utilisée pour Les Vues de Provins. Cet intérêt s'explique par la facilité d'exécution offerte par la lithographie, qui n'exige pas des artistes l'apprentissage d'une technique de gravure particulière. Cette simplification d'exécution permet non seulement de réduire le temps nécessaire a? la réalisation d'une estampe, mais aussi d'acquérir rapidement une renommée grâce a? la diffusion quasi immédiate de ces images. Cette avancée technologique explique pourquoi la lithographie est devenue rapidement une alternative intéressante, tant sur le plan financier que commercial, par rapport à d'autres procédés.PROVENANCE; Bookplate of M.C.D. Borden in each volume. Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden was born on July 18, 1842 in Fall River, Mass., the son of Col. Richard and Abby W. (Durfee) Bordon. He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, and graduated from Yale University in 1864. At Yale he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and Skull and Bones. Later that year he entered one of New York's leading dry goods house as a stock boy. In 1865, he married his relative, Harriet M. Durfee, and they had seven children.Borden came to New York after graduation, working as a clerk in a dry goods jobbing house. Three years later he became a partner in a commission firm and represented the American Print Cloth Works of Fall River. This concern failed in 1879, but Mr. Borden reorganized it in 1880 as the American Printing Company. In 1869, Borden decided to manufacture his own cotton rather than buying it from others to supply his printing mills. He built three mills to begin with, and ultimately the Falls River Iron Works Mills was a thriving business. He was a compassionate man regarding his employees, raising wages in times of depression, and his mills were not struck by the labor unions when his relatives' mills were.Borden also kept a home in New York City at 25 West 56th Street, where he had many financial interests, being a director of the Manhattan Company Bank, the Lincoln N.
