LARGE-PAPER COPY, UNTRIMMED OF BUC'HOZ'S HERBAL

LARGE-PAPER COPY, UNTRIMMED OF BUC'HOZ'S HERBAL BUC'HOZ, Pierre Joseph (1731–1807). Herbier ou collection des plantes medicinales de la Chine D'après un Manuscrit peint et unique qui se trouve dans la Bibliotheque de l'Empereur de la Chine, pour servir de suitte a la collection des fleurs qui se cultivent dans les Jardins de la Chine et de l'Europe. Dirigé par les Soins de M.r Buc'hoz, Médecin de Monsieur. Paris: chez l’Auteur, 1781. First edition. Here is what AI says it’s worth: $19,120. Folio (19 ¼” x 11 15/16”, 494mm x 304mm): χ1. 1 leaf, pp. [2] (2pp. explanation of plates). With 101 engraved plates: an engraved title and 100 engraved botanical plates with hand-color. Bound in contemporary brown marbled boards, (re-)backed with cream paper. On the spine, author and title ink manuscript to a paper label. All edges of the text-block untrimmed. Re-backed, with some rubbing to the covers and wear at the extremities. Spine-label chipped at the front hinge. Front free end-paper, plate list and rear free end-paper foxed. Plates quite fresh, albeit some tanned or foxed at the very peripheries. An earlier description (of this volume?) taped to the front paste-down. An almost-unsophisticated example, tall and clean. Pierre Joseph Buc’hoz (his father wrote “Bughaut;” 1731–1807) shifted course from Classics to law and finally to medicine, with a particular interest in botany. His great stepping-stone was the appointment in 1759 as personal doctor to Stanisław Leszczyński, twice King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania and, after the marriage of his daughter Marie Leszczyńska to Louis XV — queen consort for over 40 years — Duke of Lorraine. With that lofty title he was free to publish widely, including a fourteen-volume Histoire naturelle de la France. As botanical demonstrator at the royal medical college at Nancy, he was exposed not only to plant specimens native to Europe but also to those brough in from abroad. The unique manuscript in the library of the Emperor of China is probably a fabrication, but the plates of the present work — its only letterpress is the list at the end — are most certainly in the Chinese style. Blunt claims that the “early plates were actually painted in China,” though it is not clear with what authority. It is curious that Buc’hoz frames an essentially decorative work as a collection of medical plants, especially when 60 (nos. 11-71) of the plates were first published in the generalist Centurie de Planches… begun in 1775. Hunt 660; Nissen, BBI 284; Pritzel 1639; Sitwell, Great Flower Books p. 81.

Utropspris:SEK 246,109.97

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