Recueil de Cent Estampes Represéntant Differentes Nations du Levant, Gravées sur les Tableaux Peints d'apres Nature en 1707 et 1708. Par le Ordres de M. De Ferriol Ambassadeur du Roi a la Porte; Et Mis au Jour en 1712 et 1713. Par les Soins de M. Le Hay. Parts I and II

Paris: Chez Basan Graveur, 1714. Folio. (21 x 13 1/2 inches). Cars's edition. [2] [I]-[XVI] [1-210] 228 pp. 114 ff. 102 hand-colored engraved plates extensively heightened with gold and mica chips, numbered 1-100, 2 unnumbered, and 3 are double-page. The engravings are by Bernard Baron (1696-1762), Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1688-1754), Jacques de Franssieres (fl.1670-1730), Claude Du Bosc (1682-1745), Jean-Baptise Haussard (c.1680-1749), Pierre de Rochefort (1673-1728), Gerard Scotin the Older (1643-1715) and Younger (c.1698-1755), and Philippe Simmoneau (c.1685-1753), after Jean-Baptiste Van Mour. Title, Preface, Anecdotes de l'Ambassade, Explication des Figures, Music Sheet, 102 hand-colored engravings. Quarter green morocco with tips, straight-grain paper boards with gilt roll-tooled borders, spine in seven gilt-ruled compartments with title in second compartment and gilt device of a lyre in the rest, edges uncut

A beautiful example of the expanded edition, uncut with all the plates finely colored and many luxuriously heightened with gold and mica chips, of Le Hay, de Ferriol, and Van Mour's landmark Turqurie work depicting the costume of the Ottoman Empire.

The greatest color-plate book of the Ottoman Empire, the Recueil has 99 typological portraits and 3 scenes of Ottoman life at the dawn of the Tulip Era after paintings by Jean-Baptiste Van Mour. Van Mour was a Flemish-French painter who studied with Jacques-Albert Gérin (d.1702) and lived in Constantinople from the early-1700s until his death in 1737. One hundred of Van Mour's highly successful paintings were commissioned by the Marquis Charles de Ferriol between 1699 and 1709, while de Ferriol was the French ambassador to the Porte. De Ferriol represented Louis XIV in the Ottoman Empire at Hungary and Constantinople from 1692-1711 during the rule of Sultan Ahmed III. De Ferriol then worked with the artist and publisher Jacques Le Hay to have a roster of well-regarded printmakers execute engravings after Van Mour's paintings, and to publish the resulting collection. The project was so well-received that Van Mour was granted the unique post of "Peintre Ordinaire du Roi en Levant" in 1725. The plates after Van Mour depict Ottomans in the costumes of the Turkish court, nobility, and military, as well as of the distinctive regional, religious, and ethnic identities found in the diverse Empire. These include portraits of the Chief Eunuch; a Turkish man cutting his arm to prove his love for his mistress; Turkish women playing a form of backgammon; Dervishes whirling; an Albanian soldier; and a merchant in a bazaar feeding six cats. Van Mour's paintings, and the plates which were derived from them, show Constantinople as a cosmopolitan cultural center where Muslims and non-Muslims unite in shared Ottoman pleasures. Armenians, Franks, Greeks, and Persians drink coffee, make music, and dance together. The diverse peoples depicted here include Greeks (10); Armenians (5); Barbary Coast (4); Jews (3); Wallachians (3); Albanians (2); Hungarians (2); Bulgarians (2); Persians (2); Indians (2); Crimean Tartars (1); Arabs (1); and Moors (1). The Recueil enjoyed widespread popularity and dissemination and became the "basic prototype for Levantine costume plates." [Atabey] It was in part responsible for the vogue for Turquerie, or European images of Turkish Ottoman life, a form of exoticism popular in the Rococo period, which prefigured the Orientalist craze which would come to dominate much of European painting in the 1800s. The Recueil's use as a sourcebook by artists and publishers of other European texts was rampant. The work was translated into at least five languages, including the German edition printed at Nuremberg in 1719-21, and Italian and Spanish pirated editions. The plates were used by Thomas Jeffreys in his Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations in 1757 and by Viero in his Raccolta, published in Venice in 1783. Most copies were issued uncolored, and these are still the majority of copies seen today. A few were sold with hand-coloring and an even smaller number were extensively embellished with gold and mica chips to simulate the jewels in the buckles and finery of the many Ottoman portraits. The present uncut copy is extensively embellished and its coloring is especially attractive. This example of the second edition edited by Cars contains the Recueil, the Explication, and the additional leaf titled "Anecdotes de l'Ambassade de M. de Ferriol." Usually, the title page to this edition carries the name of "L. Cars" together with that of Basan, but the present copy, and that from the Atabey collection, have the name of Basan alone.

Atabey 429-430. Blackmer 591. Boppe, Les Peintres du Bosphore au XVIIIe Siècle, passim. Brunet III, 947-948. Cohen and De Ricci 619-620. Colas 1819-20. Graesse IV, 150. Lipperheide 1413-4. O'Quinn, Engaging the Ottoman Empire, p.93. Vinet 2335.