Buck's Antiquities

£57,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

a crucial cultural touchstone of the eighteenth century A handsome and complete set of this monumental collection of castles, abbeys, country houses, and city prospects, regarded as a crucial cultural touchstone of the eighteenth century. Buck's Antiquities preserves many castles and abbeys, which are now totally destroyed, and the ways of life of the towns and cities captured in their urban panoramas before the industrial revolution. This was the intention: unlike other works of the time that merely sought to romanticise English history, the Bucks sought to 'rescue the mangled remains... [of] these aged venerable edifices from the inexorable jaws of time'. By all accounts they succeeded, as their engravings now stand as an invaluable source of local history and topography. The entire project took Samuel Buck (1696-1779) and his brother Nathaniel Buck (d.1759/1774) thirty-four years, with eighteen years of travelling between 1724 and 1742 and the engravings themselves appearing in parts from 1726 through to 1753. The commercial success of the enterprise initially made the Buck brothers wealthy, as is shown by the ostentatious mezzotint twin portrait engraved by Richard Houston after the painting by Joseph Highmore. Despite initial success, financial difficulties in later life forced the brothers to sell the plates to Robert Sayer in 1774, who then reissued the complete work in three volumes under the title Buck's Antiquities as here. Each plate has a, sometimes extensive, des

• Binding: Hardcover

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