Gabriel Daniel
Histoire de France
Mariette, Rollin, Delespine and Coignard, Paris, Vol. 1, 1729.
Binding: 21 x 26 x 5 cm. Speckled calf, gilded rules, banded spine with gilt tooling almost detached, illustrated, with a full-page frontispiece and fold-out maps.
This revised edition of a book by the French Jesuit Père Gabriel Daniel (1649–1728), first appeared in 1713, and became a major source book for the history of the French monarchy.
The frontispiece was designed bys François Verdier (1651-1730) a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and was engraved either by Simon Thomassin (1638/54?-1733) – or possibly his son Henri Simon Thomassin (1688-1741).
The elder Thomassin was also in the Académie Royale, under the patronage of the finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and an engraver to Louis XIV. The maps are unsigned, and the book has many fine woodcuts as head and tailpieces. [pics: JM1 075-078]
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