Main Content
Summary
Author: Pigage, Nicolas de
Title: La galerie électorale de Dusseldorff ou catalogue raisonné et figuré de ses tableaux ... ouvrage composé dans un goût nouveau.
Publication: Basel, Christian von Mechel 1778.
Price: £2,400
Reference: 06808
Full Description
Oblong folio. xiv (incl. title leaf with engr vignette) +34 +28+52+42+28+44pp, also 6 part title leaves with engr vignettes, and (30) engr plates (numbered A-D, I-XXVI) . Contemporary full calf, neatly rebacked. Occasional faint browning, and an unobtrusive light dampstain on upper margins of a few plates towards the end of the volume., but a fresh and generally pleasing copy. Nineteenth century armorial bookplate of (Sir) Thomas Munro (Bart.) (1819-1901) (of Lindertis, Scotland, son of Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras). Bookplate of Peter and Linda Murray.
The collection of Old Master paintings catalogued in this volume had been formed at the beginning of the 18th century by the Elector Johann Wilhelm of the Palatinate, and housed by him in a gallery next to his palace, but their European fame stemmed from the present publication, showing the collection as rehung according to the school to which each painting belonged. This had been done under the supervision of Lambert Krahe, director of the gallery and since 1767 also the head of the Düsseldorf Academy of Drawing and Painting, but the impact of this volume owed as much to the careful cataloguing and the meticulous standard of the engraving of the plates, which so impressed the outside world that Christian von Mechel was summoned to Vienna to produce a similar catalogue of the Imperial collection of paintings. The volume remains of exceptional interest as a record not just of the paintings themselves (they include an excellent selection of the works of Dutch and Flemish artists of the seventeenth century, as well as some fine individual paintings attributed to Raphael, Veronese and Luca Giordano), but of how they were arranged and hung in the gallery, for the plates show exactly how the paintings were disposed on each wall of each room, and this is the more important because not long afterwards the paintings were removed from Düsseldorf to Munich where they were amalgamated with the existing collection of the Electors of Bavaria. It remains to note that Nicolas de Pigage (1723-1796), who carried primary responsibility for the publication, occupied the post of "Premier Architecte Directeur Général des Bâtimens & Jardins" at the court of the then reigning Elector Palatine, and was the ablest architect working in the Rhineland in the second half of the 18th century. Berlin Cat 3973.