Pierre [Petrus] Marchant (also Marchand) (French, active c. 1601–1625)

Three ornament prints for goldsmiths from the suite Bouquets de joaillerie, feuilles stylisées et cosses de pois, including the signed and dated title plate.

[Paris], 1623.

Three loose engravings with blackwork, printed on seventeenth-century laid paper; sheets approximately 11,8 x 8,5 to 13 x 9,8 cm.
The title plate is inscribed Petrus Marchant / Fecit. 1623, with the artist’s large interlaced PM monogram below; two of the accompanying ornament plates are likewise monogrammed.

               Three prints from one of the most inventive French ornament suites of the early seventeenth century, produced at a decisive moment in the development of the cosse de pois, or peapod style, a short-lived form of Parisian ornament in which pea flowers, pods, seeds and curling tendrils were transformed into fantastical jewellery. Marchant’s designs are particularly inventive: peas become pearls or diamonds and open pods become settings for gemstones, while blackwork gives the prints their striking black-and-white contrast. As Marika Takanishi Knowles has shown, such suites were not merely practical models for goldsmiths, but also displays of artistic ingenuity and professional self-promotion (Ornament in the Kitchen Garden, 2017).

Marchant was a Protestant goldsmith working on the Île de la Cité in Paris, who was admitted to the city’s goldsmiths’ guild only in 1625, two years after publishing these prints. The suite may therefore have served both as a portfolio and as a means of circulating his designs before his formal admission. Marchant transformed pea flowers, pods, seeds and curling tendrils into elaborate models for jewellery: peas become pearls and faceted stones, while split pods form settings for imagined gems. Engraving is combined with blackwork, in which deeply worked areas retain dense deposits of ink, creating opaque black forms crossed by fine white reserves and recalling contemporary black-and-white enamelled metalwork.

We have traced only two institutional holdings of original impressions from the suite: one at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for which no photographs are available, and another mounted in an album in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris. Curiously, the three sheets in the present group that could be compared directly with the INHA impressions differ from them in several details. Most notably, our title plate bears a large PM monogram below the signed and dated inscription, whereas the INHA impression does not. On one of the jewellery designs the reverse occurs: the INHA impression bears a monogram that is absent from ours. There also appear to be smaller discrepancies in the positioning of the monograms and in the engraved linework. Such differences are not easily explained as ordinary changes of state and may indicate that the present impressions were printed from independently re-engraved plates, perhaps belonging to a contemporary parallel version of the suite. A facsimile acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1919 reproduces a title plate bearing both the full inscription and the PM monogram, confirming that this monogrammed version was historically known; without photographs of the Met’s original impressions, however, the precise relationship between the different versions cannot yet be established.

Condition: The sheets have been trimmed, in places close to the compositions, with scattered light foxing, surface soiling, small stains and old graphite annotations, but retain their intricate engraved detail and dense blackwork.

References:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Drawings and Prints. Pierre Marchant, Title Page: Design for Jewelry and five plates entitled Design for Jewelry, 1623. Engraving and blackwork. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924. Accession nos. 24.100.9–24.100.14.

Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Collections Jacques Doucet, Paris. Pierre Marchand, six plates from Bouquets de joaillerie, feuilles stylisées et cosses de pois, 1623, mounted in the album Petits maîtres I. École française: Carteron, Christollien, Firens, Gandin, Hurtu, Hedouyns, Marchant, Millot, Nolin. Shelfmark FOL RES 120 (1–12), fols. 58–63; digital identifier NUM FOL RES 120 (1–12).

Guilmard, Les maîtres ornemanistes (1880), no. 16.

Katalog der Ornamentstich-Sammlung der Staatlichen Kunstbibliothek Berlin (1939), no. 795, p. 118.

Fuhring and Bimbenet-Privat, “Le style ‘cosse de pois’” (2002).

Knowles, “Ornament in the Kitchen Garden” (2017), pp. 964–93.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. nos. 19.66 and 24.100.9–14.