New acquisition: Nieuhof's embassy to the Emperor of China, 1665
We are pleased to announce the acquisition of a complete copy of Johan Nieuhof's L'Ambassade de la Compagnie Orientale des Provinces Unies vers l'Empereur de la Chine, the first French edition, printed at Leiden for Jacob van Meurs in 1665, the same year as the Dutch original. Nieuhof travelled as steward of the Dutch East India Company's embassy to the court of the Shunzhi Emperor in Peking in 1655 to 1657, with orders to draw everything he saw in its true form. His sketches, engraved in Amsterdam by Van Meurs, gave Europe its first eyewitness picture of the interior of China: the walled cities on the rivers, the Porcelain Pagoda of Nanking, the Imperial court and the costumes of mandarins, soldiers and actors. The book was read at the court of Louis XIV, copied by every atlas maker and porcelain painter of the age, and is the source of a century of chinoiserie. Our copy has the engraved title, the portrait, the folding map and all thirty-four double-page plates, and it has never left its first binding, a French calf binding stamped with the gilt arms of a monastery of St Martin; in the nineteenth century it belonged to the painters Jules-Romain Joyant and Louis Thienon in Paris. The firm has a particular bond with this book: Nieuhof's own manuscript of drawings passed through the hands of Frederik Muller and Co. in the 1890s, when Prince Roland Bonaparte bought it for the collection that is now in the Bibliotheque nationale de France.