Lauters, P.
Souvenir du Sacré-Coeur de Jette St Pierre près Bruxelles.
(Bruxelles), J. Lots nd (1846 ?).
Full Description
Folio. Tinted litho title leaf (finished with handcolouring), 15 tinted litho plates. Some light spotting, mostly marginal, on first half dozen plates. Orig. cloth, with printed paper label on upper cover.
A scarce and attractive volume of lithographic views of the garden attached to a girls’ boarding school run by nuns at Jette, outside Brussels. By a fortunate chance the drawing master at the school happened to be Paulus Lauters, a well-known Belgian topographical artist and book illustrator, and this resulted in this evocative record of a type of garden for which there is otherwise very little or even no published evidence. The distinctive feature of the garden at Jette was that the standard components of an early nineteenth century landscaped garden – rustic bridge, column, obelisk, rocks, cascade, Chinese pavilion – were accompanied by such explicitly religious features as statues of the Virgin Mary and a Calvary, while the obligatory garden hermitage was associated with St. Anthony. We are not aware of any other set of views of a similar “Christianised” landscape garden, and the present publication deserve a place in any serious collection of books on the subject. No date appears on its title leaf, but one of Lauters’ plates is from a drawing dated 1846.