Description des monumens de Rhodes, dédiée à Sa Majesté le Roi des Pays-Bas.

First edition, in its first issue with the imprint of the Imprimerie de Tencé frères, Brussels, 1828. The text volume is illustrated with a portrait of Bernard Eugène Antoine Rottiers, lithographed by J. Van Genk after Sir Thomas Lawrence; the atlas contains an engraved map, numbered 1, and 74 lithographic plates numbered 2 to 75, plate 27 being mistakenly numbered 17. Eight plates are hand-coloured: nos. 28, 41, and 61 to 66. The text volume was reissued in 1830 under a new imprint; the present issue is the true first publication of the work.

The text volume is bound in contemporary half dark green morocco, the spine with four raised bands bordered with gilt garlands and decorated with gilt tools, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns; corners worn. The atlas is bound in contemporary half red calf with corners, smooth spine ruled in gilt, marbled paper boards; rubbing to spine, scratches to boards, wear to board edges and corners. Some foxing; staining at the foot of plate no. 10 and occasional light foxing to several other plates.

Brunet neatly summed up the appeal of the work: “Ouvrage curieux et dont les planches sont fort belles”.

During the archaeological mission entrusted to him in the Levant by King William I of the Netherlands, Rottiers reached Rhodes in early 1826 with his son Victor and the young Antwerp painter Pierre-Joseph Witdoeck, then only twenty-three years old. They remained there for some five months; Witdoeck drew the island’s coastline, harbour and fortifications, the city gates, palace, churches, tombs, the priories of the various “langues” of the Order, and the frescoes still visible in a number of buildings.

Rottiers himself described the difficulties of the undertaking: “Les Turcs n’avaient permis à personne, jusqu’à nous, de dessiner les monumens de l’île, surtout l’intérieur des églises et des autres édifices…” The same obstacles, he wrote, had to be faced in order to record the fortifications, harbour, and tombs. His account gives the plates an almost immediate quality; behind each one lies a drawing made on the spot, in a city whose medieval fabric was soon to suffer major losses.

The lithographs therefore preserve Rhodes as it appeared before the destructions of the mid-19th century. In 1856, the explosion of a powder magazine devastated part of the medieval city and destroyed, among other structures, monuments that Witdoeck had still been able to record. His drawings later became an important source for the study, and eventually the restoration, of the architecture of the Knights Hospitaller; what had begun as the illustrated record of an expedition gradually acquired the value of an archive.

The expedition itself was not regarded as an unqualified success by the Dutch authorities, particularly as regards the acquisition of antiquities; Rhodes nevertheless proved its most enduring achievement. In 1826, Witdoeck still had before his eyes the fortifications, churches, tombs, and buildings of the Knights Hospitaller that his atlas was to preserve on paper; thirty years later, several of them had already disappeared or been profoundly altered.