Moor Park, with a Biographical Sketch of its Principal Proprietors.
8vo [20 x 15.5 cm]. (8) ff, 124 ff, with 8 original photos mounted on carton. Bound in original gold-tooled paneled purple cloth, title gold-stamped on the front cover, edges gilt. Some faint scattered foxing. An inscribed copy from Lord Ebury to Madame La Ducesees de Luynes. A history of Moor Park, a Palladian house surrounded by a large park in Hertfordshire, England. The estate’s gardens were made famous in the seventeenth century by Sir William Temple, who described them in his Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, one of the key early modern texts on gardening. He called Moor Park “the sweetest Place […] I have ever seen in my Life, either before or since, at Home or Abroad” [Quoted in Jeffrey, p. 160]. His admiration of it was so complete, that he even renamed his own estate Moor Park. Throughout the centuries, Moor Park changed many hands, but the outline of the formal garden that so inspired William Temple, can still be recognized today. In the nineteenth century, the park became famous for its fruit. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park characters refer to the “moor park” apricot as a sign of wealth. Moor Park is also credited with cultivating the commercial strawberry, a hybrid between European strawberry and a Chilean species. The owner of Moor Park at the time of this book’s publication, Robert Grosvenor, Baron Ebury is pictured in a photo in this book (the photo in our copy differs from the one in OCLC 1166431632). All the eight photos in this monograph are by Henri Victor Leménager (1822-1912), a Paris-born photographer, who had a photographic studio in Bushey Herts, Hertfordshire before he emigrated to the United States in 1887. A manuscript dedication to La Duchesse de Luynes dated 1880 from “Lord Ebury”—Robert Grosvenor, Baron Ebury, the owner of Moor Park - “Presente a Madame La Duchesse de Luynes Ld. Ebury 23 Juin 1880.” OCLC: John Hopkins, Penn and U of Texas. *Helmut Gernsheim, Incunabula of British Photographic Literature: A Bibliography of British Photographic Literature, 1839-75, and British Books Illustrated with Original Photographs (1984), 528; M. L. Gothein, A History of Garden Art (1979), I, p. 457; S. Jeffrey, “The Formal Gardens at Moor Park in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Garden History, vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter 2014), p. 157-177; OCLC 1166431632.
Price: $1,750.00