L'Art Arabe d'après les Monuments du Kaire depuis le VIIe Siècle jusqu'à la Fin du XVIIIe (Limited Facsimile Edition)

Achille Constant Théodore Émile Prisse d'Avennes (1807–1879) spent nearly thirty years in Egypt accumulating an archive of drawings, measurements, and observations that no European before him had assembled with comparable thoroughness. He was among the first archaeologists to use photography for the documentation of monuments. He was also contentious, impractical, and frequently at odds with colleagues, institutions, and the broader expectations of the scholarly world. 

L'Art Arabe, published in parts by V.A. Morel between 1869 and 1877 and completed just in time for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878, is the more immediately spectacular of the two. Its subject is the Islamic art and architecture of Cairo from the seventh century to the end of the eighteenth: the mosques, madrasas, minarets, and domestic interiors of the city; its carved woodwork and marble inlay, its glass and metalwork, its textiles and ceramics, its Quranic manuscripts and their illuminations. The 199 plates that document this world were produced by a combination of engraving and lithography, with the chromolithographic plates among the most technically demanding and visually sumptuous plate-book illustrations of the nineteenth century. They represent a tradition of Islamic decorative art that was already changing irreversibly when Prisse d'Avennes recorded it, and that in many instances has since been significantly altered or lost.

The publication seems to have been well received at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, but does not appear to have achieved the success or widespread influence of Owen Jones's earlier Grammar of Ornament, published in London in 1856. Its time came later. The decorative quality and documentary value of the plates have in recent decades prompted sustained revival of interest, and the Khayat facsimile reprint — produced in Beirut around 1973 and printed in Italy by Legatoria Pegaso to a high standard — made the plates accessible to a generation of scholars, designers, and collectors for whom the original four-volume set of 1877 was prohibitively rare and expensive.

The three plate volumes offered here are the heart of the publication. The absent text volume (viii, 296 pp., illustrated with 34 plates and numerous text illustrations, with a separate appendix of tables) provides scholarly apparatus and extended commentary, but the plates are self-sufficient as a visual record: each carries its own caption in French and Arabic, and the three volumes together constitute a comprehensive visual survey of the tradition Prisse d'Avennes spent his life documenting.

L'Art Arabe d'après les Monuments du Kaire depuis le VIIe Siècle jusqu'à la Fin du XVIIIe. Facsimile reprint of the first edition: Paris: V. A. Morel, 1869–1877. Text volume (4to, viii, 296 pp.) not present with this set; plate volumes only. Atlas Folio (63.5 × 49 cm). Three volumes bound in two-tone faux leather: spine in coffee, covers in mustard. Spine with raised bands, titling to covers and spines in gilt. Half-titles with colour vignettes. Titles in red and black. Captions to plates in French and Arabic. 199 full-page plates in total across all three volumes, each volume with its own table of contents: 22 engraved plates, 177 lithographed plates (of which 39 are tinted views and 130 chromolithographs, several heightened with gold). Reprinted by Eastern Art; bound in Italy by Legatoria Pegaso. Internal binding has slightly loosened in all three volumes, attributable to their considerable size and weight. Overall presents wonderfully; internally clean and bright throughout.

Please note: This is a very large and extremely heavy three-volume set. Additional postage costs will apply. Please contact us for a shipping quote before purchase — international shipping for this item will be significant.

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Catalogue Number: HH000621