Le Dessinateur, pour les fabriques d'etoffes d'or, d'argent et de soie
CHF 2,229.00
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First edition of the first printed French manual of silk design, published against the wishes of the Lyon silk guild
Joubert de l'Hiberderie, Antoine-Nicolas
Le Dessinateur, pour les fabriques d'etoffes d'or, d'argent et de soie
Avec la traduction de six tables raisonnees, tirees de l'Abecedario pittorico, imprime a Naples en 1733
1765, Paris, Sebastien Jorry; Bauche; Brocas
First Edition
CHF 2,229.00
Sale price
CHF 2,229.00
Regular price
Overview
In 8vo. Pp. [2] f.e., xlviii, 218, [6], [2] r.e.
First edition of the first published description in French of the profession of silk designer, issued in Paris by Sébastien Jorry, Bauche, and Brocas in 1765. Until then, much of the specialized knowledge of the Lyon silk designer belonged to the workshop rather than the printed page. Joubert, himself a Lyon silk designer admitted to the guild by special dispensation, published the book despite the reservations of the city's silk-weaving guild, which feared that it would disclose its techniques to competing manufacturers abroad and argued that the manuscript should be kept from publication. Joubert took it to Paris regardless. Part trade manual, part artistic education, and part guide to the capital, the book was also something of a curriculum vitae for an author newly bankrupt and petitioning the state for a pension on the strength of his expertise.
Inside the book
A historical and philosophical preface opens the work, tracing the development of Lyon's silk-design trade through its leading practitioners, foremost among them Jean Revel, and offering practical advice to parents on recognizing artistic aptitude worth cultivating in a child. Fourteen numbered chapters follow, each devoted to a named category of patterned silk: a remarkably detailed catalogue of luxury fabrics, from satin, damask, taffeta, and velvet to figured and brocaded textiles woven with gold and silver thread. The fourteenth and longest chapter is devoted to moires, the watered silks that were Joubert's own specialty. Five woodcut figures show point-repeat and comber-repeat arrangements for brocaded moire, including diagrams distinguishing designs worked "à pointe" from those worked "à chemin," and a four-part floral silk pattern intended for a moire five-thirds of an ell wide. The illustrations are technical rather than decorative: they translate the designer's repeat into a form that could be understood in relation to the loom. A fifteenth chapter, "Le Voyage de Paris," takes the young designer out of the workshop and through the capital, directing him toward its sights, shops, collections, and artistic resources as part of his professional education. The volume closes with Joubert's translation of six "tables raisonnées" from Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi's "Abecedario pittorico," taken from the enlarged Naples edition of 1733, which was dedicated to the painter Francesco Solimena. The section expands the silk designer's education into the fine arts, combining a bibliography of works on architecture and perspective with practical instruction and a canon of Old Masters. Particular artists are recommended for particular qualities worth studying: Correggio for softness, Raphael for grace and contour, Titian for composition, Veronese for invention, Claude Lorrain for landscape, and Michelangelo and Bernini for modeling. Throughout the book Joubert invokes the authority of men within both the Lyon textile industry and the Parisian art world: the silk manufacturer and Deputy of Commerce Louis Pernon, designer and manufacturer Jean-Victor Geneve, and veteran designer Pierre Ringuet, alongside the King's engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin and the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier. The result is an unusual record of a profession at the moment its guarded workshop knowledge began to become public knowledge.
Condition
Contemporary full calf, gilt fillets with floral cornerpieces to the boards; spine with gilt-ruled compartments and gilt-lettered leather label; all edges gilt. Binding worn, particularly at the spine, which is darkened with a chipped head. Front board a little weak but not loose. Pastedowns and free endpapers of beautiful, delicate block-printed paper with a gilt checkered pattern on a pink ground; silk page-marker detached but present. A light pencil drawing of a face to the verso of the second front free endpaper. Some pages misnumbered (xxxv, 129-144, 131, 36). Fine decorative engraving opening the "Épître"; woodcut head- and tailpieces, together with five woodcut textile diagrams. A sound and attractive copy of a trade manual. Very good.
Dimensions (inches): 7 3/4 x 4 3/4 x 1
Why La Fenice likes it
Lyon had secrets worth stealing: its silk designers carried the knowledge of Europe's most coveted fabrics from workshop to workshop, and the guild wanted it kept that way. But, as in the best spy stories, our man Joubert put the trade into a book. The guild wanted the manuscript suppressed; he took it to Paris and printed it anyway: patterns, techniques, professional tricks, even the artists a young designer should study. Industrial espionage, eighteenth-century style - except the man leaking the secrets signed his name to the title page with pride.
About the author
Antoine-Nicolas Joubert de l'Hiberderie (b. Antibes, 1725 or 1729; d. after 1775) appears also simply as Antoine-Nicolas Joubert; the origin of the added name "de l'Hiberderie" remains unexplained.
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