Design for a parterre for a pleasure garden
Engraving, with a garden design, part of an album with with 30 plates (mostly folded) of garden designs created by André Mollet and dedicated to Queen Kristina of Sweden. The album intends to provide inspiration for garden designers in France and Sweden in the creation of flower beds, groves, and other garden decorations.This design consists of a design for a parterre with an ornamental vase with two scrolling handles, holding a bundle of stylized exotic flowers, scrolling leaves, and a palmette in the center, flanked above by more scrolling branches with leaves and stylized exotic flowers, ending on a crown on the summit of the design, and two cornucopias, from which emerge two streams of water (?) that scroll up to the sides of the parterre. The border of the parterre also consists of streams of water. The design would have likely been created with boxwood embroideries, or by cutting grass into patterns and accentuated with hedges, flowers, and different kinds of ground cover, to achieve the 'compartiments de gazon', a type of grass designs popular in 17th-century France.
Artwork Details
- Title: Design for a parterre for a pleasure garden
- Designer: André Mollet (French, active 17th century)
- Designer: Jacques Mollet (French)
- Designer: Noel Mollet (French)
- Engraver: Jan van de Velde IV (Dutch, Utrecht before 1610–1686 Haarlem)
- Engraver: Wolfgang Hartmann
- Publisher: Henry Kayser , Stockholm
- Dedicatee: Kristina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish, 1626–1689)
- Date: 1651
- Medium: Engraving
- Dimensions: Sheet: 19 11/16 × 15 1/2 in. (50 × 39.3 cm)
Plate: 19 1/8 × 13 11/16 in. (48.6 × 34.8 cm)
Album: 15 3/4 × 10 1/16 × 1 1/8 in. (40 × 25.5 × 2.9 cm) - Classifications: Books, Prints, Ornament & Architecture
- Credit Line: Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926
- Object Number: 26.104.5(15)
- Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints
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