Cuttings album, including engravings by Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels.
Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels, et al. [Album of woodcuts and engravings]. S.l. [France]: s.n., s.a. [late 18th and early 19th centuries]. Folio album [29.1 x 24.1 cm], [72] ff., with [203] mounted woodcut and engraved cuttings. Bound in late 18th- or early 19th-century vellum. Losses to extremities of spine with joints separating in those areas, spine and boards rather dusty. Some cutting with glue stains at the corners, stubs from several removed leaves, a few leaves becoming loose or bisected horizontally but not affecting cuttings, toning and edge wear to album pages.
An unusual late 18th- or early 19th-century French album containing more than 200 mounted woodcuts and engravings, most of which were excised from books. These generally date to the 18th-century, but some are from the previous century, and several are from the nineteenth century.
The compiler or compilers of the album had no firm theme in their selection, but some 30 of the prints are fine ornamental headpieces or tailpieces, most of which center on the royal fleurs-de-lis. A few dozen of the cutting are engravings of Italian views and monuments by the renowned female printmaker Magdeleine Horthemels (1686-1767). There are taken from the four-volume Les délices de l’Italie, contenant une description exacte du païs, des principales villes (first ed. in 1707). Overall, the compiler’s taste is exotic and royalist.
The first three quarters of the album uses pages of laid paper, but the last quarter is on wove paper, and the bulk of the nineteenth-century cuttings are mounted here, suggesting that perhaps the album was composed in two campaigns.
Many books and prints were mutilated during the découpage craze in 18th-century France with cut-up images being pasted both in albums and on furniture, interior walls, etc. Anthony Griffiths writes that découpage “was satirically described as a novelty in an article in the Mercure de France in November 1727: the ladies had abandoned their needlework and weaving, and their gallants were impressing them by their skillful manipulation of a pair of scissors … The author described the vogue as a fury that would not last long but that while it did, any fine prints had to be carefully hidden away to escape the scissors. He implied that what made this practice objectionable was the use of prints that were much too good for the purpose” (p. 213).
Magdeleine Horthemels, daughter of a Parisian bookseller, was active as an engraver by 1707. In 1713 she married the successful engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Elder (1688-1754). Her son Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger (1715-90) became an engraver and art critic to Louis XV. Horthemels worked as an artist for nearly fifty years and is best known for her depicting the community at Port-Royal des Champs and for her reproductive engravings after the works of Poussin, Le Brun, Coypel, Lancret, Watteau, and Pannini.
*A. Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550-1820; E. Poulson, “Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels: Reproductive Engraver,” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (1985), pp. 20-23.