Baillie Scott, M.H.
Dum a zahrada. Prelozili V.A.Jung a M. a J.Klimovi.
Praze (i.e.Prague), Jan Laichtner 1910.
Full Description
8vo. xi + (1) + 251 + (1)pp, 42 photo plates (of which 1 colour and folding), also text ills. Publisher’s printed wrappers, a little worn and abraded at outer margins.
Scarce translation into Czech, in a reduced format, of the British architect M.H.Baillie Scott’s Houses and Gardens, published in London in 1908. Baillie Scott’s designs for the interior of the Grand Ducal palace at Darmstadt in the 1890s had won him an Europe-wide reputation, and it is no real surprise that a translation of his book into Czech was published at Prague as early as 1910. What is very much more of a surprise is that the Czech version of the book, unlike the subsequent German translation published in Berlin in 1912, for which the Wasmuth firm provided close copies of the original illustrations, has an entirely new set of photo plates, of which only four are of designs by Baillie Scott, and most of the remainder illustrate buildings by contemporary German, Austrian and Czech architects, including Josef Maria Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, Bruno Paul, Hermann Muthesius, Jan Kotera, Otakar Novotny and Josef Gocar. This has the effect of placing Baillie Scott’s architectural work securely in its contemporary European context, and although the fact that the text of the present volume is in Czech makes it unapproachable by readers who do not understand the language, the plates carry their own significant message.