[Claude Boutet (Claude Boutet (active ca. 1673–1690s)].

Traité de la peinture en mignature. Pour apprendre aisement a peindre sans maitre. [...] Un petit traité de la peinture au pastel, avec la méthode de composer les pastels. [...] Le secret de faire les plus belles couleurs, l'or bruny, l'or en coquille, & le vernis de la Chine […].

The Hague, Louis & Henry van Dole, 1708.

12°. [14], 269, [19] pp. With an engraved allegorical frontispiece of women painting by David Coster (active 1696-1752), a double-page engraved hand coloured plate with two colour wheels and an allegory of a painting woman and a woodcut illustration in the text.

Contemporary vellum with title in ink on spine.

A very rare illustrated manual of miniature and pastel painting, addressed in large part to a female readership and conceived for autodidactic use. The volume is illustrated with two colour wheels, which provide an early visualisation of chromatic relationships. Its orientation toward female practitioners is underscored by the allegorical frontispiece and the double-page plate, both of which depict women actively engaged in artistic practice, reflecting the broader expansion of women’s participation in the visual arts.
               Claude Boutet, a Parisian miniature painter, first published his Traité de la peinture en miniature in Paris in 1673. This work became one of the most influential practical manuals on miniature painting in the later seventeenth century. The present Dutch edition of 1708, printed in French, is distinguished by the inclusion of a substantial and independent treatise on pastel painting. This addition addresses the preparation of pastels, colour recipes, and surface treatments, and positions the book among the earliest printed manuals to treat pastel as an autonomous artistic medium rather than a subsidiary technique. Particularly noteworthy is the double-page hand-coloured plate, conceived as a true “cyclopaedia of colours,” which illustrates chromatic relationships and pigment mixtures. Such colour plates are exceptionally scarce in art-theoretical and instructional books of this date.
               This edition appears to be unrecorded in the principal bibliographic reference works, including Kunst op Schrift, Arntzen/Rainwater, and the Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung Berlin.

Condition: Frontispiece and title leaf loosening; otherwise a very good to fine copy, clean and well preserved, with the colour plate fresh and attractively hand-coloured.

Literature:
R. G. Kuehni & A. Schwarz, Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Systems from Antiquity to the Present, p. 57.