Verschelde, Charles
Les anciennes maisons de Bruges dessinées d’après les monuments originaux.
Bruges, Beyaert-Defoort 1875.
Full Description
4to. 33+ (1)pp, 40 tinted litho plates, printed errata slip. Pub cloth. A little light spotting, but otherwise a good, bright copy.
A scarce volume publishing drawings by a local architect of the exteriors of some of Bruges’s finest late mediaeval and renaissance town houses, with an accompanying explanatory text. The author’s aim was to offer “une petite pierre à la réedification de notre veritable art national” by recording houses that might subsequently be demolished or altered, and by providing examples of traditional Bruges buildings which might serve as models for architects of his own time. Verschelde’s drawings had originally appeared in a Belgian periodical in 1871, but this is their first and only publication in book form and the book’s availability in the mid 1870s no doubt played some part in popularising Flemish architecture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; the British architect Sir Ernest George “discovered” the style at almost exactly this date.