Summary

Author: Gibbs, James

Title: Bibliotheca Radcliviana : or, a short description of the Radcliffe Library, at Oxford. Containing its several plans, uprights, sections and ornaments ... with the explanation of each plate.

Publication: London, for the author 1747.

Price: £1,650

Reference: 09938

Full Description

A copy of the architect James Gibbs's own monograph on the Radcliffe Library at Oxford (known today as the Radcliffe Camera), built to his designs between 1737 and 1748, and the crowning achievement in an architectural career which had started before the end of the reign of Queen Anne.Although the general character of Gibbs's design for the Radcliffe Camera had been shown in sets of engravings produced at the expense of the Radcliffe Trustees in 1737 and 1740, Gibbs's monograph of 1747 records the building in its completed state, providing measured illustrations not merely of the structure but also of its internal sculptural detail and plasterwork. It is the only British monograph of the eighteenth century devoted to a library building, and Salomon Kleiner's volume of 1737 devoted to Fischer von Erlach's Imperial Hofbibliothek in Vienna is the only obvious parallel. Robin Middleton has noted in this general context that Gibbs's decision to have an engraved portrait of himself as the frontispiece to the volume "was a gesture of brazen self-confidence, almost unprecedented in British architectural publications" and the volume as a whole reflects Gibbs's justifiable pride in his rise to the summit of the British architectural profession from a middle-class childhood in Aberdeen and an unhappy period as a theological student at the Scots College in Rome. BAL Cat 1205 ; Berlin Cat 2334 ; Fowler 139 ; Harris/Savage 256.t