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Summary
Author: Britton, John (with Pugin, Augustus, and Le Keux, John and Henry))
Title: Historical and descriptive essays accompanying a series of engraved specimens of the architectural antiquities of Normandy. Edited by John Britton, F.S.A., M.R.S.L. ... the subjects measured and drawn by Augustus Pugin, architect ... and engraved by John and Henry Le Keux.
Publication: London, “printed for the proprietors” (Britton/Pugin/J/Le Keux/H.Le Keux) 1828 (but issued in parts 1825-8).
Price: Sold
Reference: 10104
Full Description
4to. Engraved title leaf, viii + 4 + xx + 40pp, (71) engraved plates (of which 6 are double-page), partly numbered in suites. Duplicate copies in contemporary hand-colouring of the last two plates, depicting stained glass designs, also bound in. Some minor browning and spotting, chiefly at upper and lower blank margins. Later nineteenth century quarter morocco, cloth sides (the binding rubbed and the cloth sides unevenly faded). From the library of the Sisterhood of St.Margaret, East Grinstead (the Anglican convent founded by John Mason Neale), with ink presentation inscription to the Sisterhood dated 1885 (?).Bookplate of Jill Allibone.
First edition (rather more uncommon than subsequent reissues published in 1833 and 1874). Although the introductory essays were chiefly written by Britton, and Britton’s name figures prominently on the volume’s printed title leaf, Britton himself had never visited Normandy and the true credit for the volume belongs to Augustus Pugin and to the two Le Keuxs (the volume is indeed described on its engraved title leaf as “Pugin and Le Keux’s Specimens of the Architectural Antiquities of Normandy”). At the time of its publication the volume played an influential part in drawing the attention of its readers to the architecture of the great mediaeval churches in Caen, Bayeux and Rouen, the fine late mediaeval Palais de Justice in Rouen, and so on, and Augustus Pugin’s accurate drawings of architectural detail were also found useful by English architects as precedents for details in buildings of their own. BAL Cat 420 (the BAL copy, like our copy, has the two stained glass plates in hand-coloured duplicate).