Le Moyne, Louis Valcoulon
Country residences in Europe and America.
New York, Doubleday, Page & Company 1908.
Full Description
Large folio. vii + (1) + 457 + (3)pp, (4) additional part title leaves not included in pagination, hundreds of photo ills and plans. Publisher’s cloth, a little worn at head and foot of spine. Impressions of removed paper clip at upper blank corner of first few leaves. Roderick Gradidge’s copy.
An impressively large book providing many photo illustrations of the exteriors and accompanying formal gardens of major country houses in Italy, France, England and the USA, and evidently aimed at a wealthy American readership who might be persuaded to commission similar gardens of their own. What is interesting is that the Italian and French houses and gardens featured are all world famous sites of 16th and 17th century date, and that the format of the volume effectively equates them in importance with recent US houses designed by such architects as R.M. Hunt, Charles A. Platt, and Carrère and Hastings, with surrounding gardens and parks laid out by the architects themselves or by the specialist garden designer F.L. Olmsted. The English houses featured range from Chatsworth and Hatfield to smaller and more unexpected houses including Shipton Court, Oxfordshire, and Clevedon Court, Somerset : this clearly reflects the author’s personal itinerary when in England, for he states in his introduction that almost all the illustrations are from his own photographs and sketch plans, and the photographs may thus record garden features unfamiliar from other publications.