Recueil d'architecture, dessiné et mesuré en Italie, dans les années 1791, 92 et 93

First edition of this architectural collection, published in Paris in 1821 by Bance aîné and comprising seventy-two numbered etched plates. These are preceded by two distinct preliminary elements: a letterpress title page giving the author’s name as “Schuelt”, and a fully engraved title with a vignette signed by Henry J. Picou, retaining the earlier title Recueil de divers motifs d’architecture and spelling the name “Seheult”. The coexistence of these forms reflects the historical instability of the family name, which was only gradually standardised as Seheult through subsequent civil-status corrections.

Contemporary half bronze calf with small vellum corners, the smooth spine renewed and decorated with gilt ornamental bands and floral tools, olive-green calf lettering-piece, marbled paper boards. Some rubbing to the spine. A few spots of foxing; pale dampstaining to the upper right corner of most leaves.

The collection brings together views and measured studies of landscapes, villas, monuments, sarcophagi, fountains, gardens, and ornamental details observed in Italy, notably at Tivoli, Viterbo, Frascati, and Rome, from Piazza Navona and Trastevere to the approaches to the Capitol. This range of subjects corresponds closely to the author’s stated programme, which embraces houses, buildings, basilicas, doors, windows, sarcophagi, fountains, garden decorations, and architectural fragments.

The volume preserves clear evidence of a long publication history. Several plates bear engraved dates of 1810, 1811, and 1812, while their circulation is documented from 1810-1811 onwards; only in 1821 did the work receive its definitive general title and preliminary discourse. The book-form edition therefore represents the culmination of a project developed over more than a decade from drawings made considerably earlier.

Those drawings originated in François-Léonard Seheult’s Italian journey of 1791-1793. Trained in Paris at the Académie royale d’architecture, within the circles of Antoine-François Peyre and Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, Seheult travelled to Italy as a young architect, recording ancient and modern monuments, urban and rural houses, gardens, and decorative details. A substantial group of preparatory drawings is still preserved in Nantes, providing direct evidence of the transformation from travel studies to engraved publication.

After returning to Nantes, Seheult pursued his architectural career there until his death in 1840. The forms observed in Italy remained central to his visual culture and contributed more broadly to the circulation in western France of Italian models adapted to early 19th-century domestic and rural architecture. His own Nantes residence, the Hôtel des Cariatides, built in the 1820s and enriched with references to ancient and modern masters, extends the artistic culture shaped by his Italian experience.

The work should therefore be understood not merely as a picturesque series of views but as a genuine architectural repertory. Its houses, buildings, fountains, gardens, sarcophagi, and ornaments provided material for comparison and invention, allowing the observed forms of Italian architecture to be translated into new French architectural practice.

Far more than a record of Seheult’s Italian journey, this collection constitutes the repertory of forms on which the architect would draw after his return to Nantes: houses, gardens, architectural follies, and ornaments observed between 1791 and 1793 became models for a new architecture in which Italian influence helped reshape French taste at the turn of the 19th century.