Dumbarton Oaks - Library

Library

The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library contains more than 200,000 items that support the three studies programs. The Byzantine holdings of materials concerning late classical, early Christian, Byzantine, and medieval art and archaeology, which numbered 8,000 volumes at the time of the Blisses’ gift, now number 149,000 volumes with more than 550 journal subscriptions. In 1964, the Research Library acquired Robert Woods Bliss's personal collection of 2,000 rare and important works on Pre-Columbian art history, anthropology, and archaeology, which has since grown to more than 32,000 volumes, and Mildred Bliss’s garden library, including rare volumes and prints, which now includes 27,000 books and pamphlets. The Rare Book Collection has holdings of more than 10,000 volumes, prints, drawings, photographs, and blueprints.

The Rare Book Room, designed by Frederick Rhinelander King in the style of an 18th-century library, was completed in 1963 to house the collection of rare books and drawings which had been started by Mildred Bliss. Her library was enlarged, with advice from Beatrix Farrand, designer of the Dumbarton Oaks gardens, once Mrs. Bliss conceived the idea in the 1950s of starting a program of studies in landscape architecture.

The collection of books originated in Mrs. Bliss’s aim to preserve illustrated books from being broken up for individual plates. There are volumes of views which are especially valuable for the study of gardens since few of the sites survive as originally created. For example, Giovanni Battista Falda’s 17th-century plates showing the gardens of Rome; views of Versailles and other royal gardens in Louis XIV’s France by Perelle and Sylvestre; and Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff’s early-18th-century bird’s-eye views of English country estates. The latter works yield almost the only evidence of the appearance of these geometrical or regular designs before their supplanting by the irregular or “picturesque” taste.

Since landscape architecture grew out of other professions – most obviously, those of architecture, botany and horticulture – the collection also includes treatises by great architectural theorists such as Alberti, Palladio, and Serlio as well as works by such distinguished botanists as Clusius and Linnaeus, or Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina. Books on buildings that served as models for garden structures like pavilions and follies and others relating to the design and decoration of fountains, with the hydraulics necessary for their operation, are included, along with books on sculpture and iconography.

Many volumes in the library describe great gardens or garden practice, for example Robert Castell’s The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated and various editions of Andrew Jackson Downing’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. The collection is also rich in works illustrating flowers and plants – early herbals and botanical writings, floras – works on horticulture, and even agriculture as it affects the life of country estates, such as a 1495 edition of Pietro de' Crescenzi’s Il libro della agricultura. The herbals represent early attempts to create a coherent system of plant description and are forerunners of today’s science of taxonomy. Two of them, the Herbarius Latinus, printed in Passau in 1486, and the Hortus Sanitatis, printed in Mainz in 1491, are among the earliest printed books with woodcut illustrations.

As the science of botany developed, so did the art of plant illustration. Early herbals had simple, not very realistic, woodcut illustrations of plants. By the 17th century new graphic techniques, such as metal plate engraving and etching, permitted highly detailed botanical renderings. These techniques were also used by artists who created the newly popular still lifes of flowers and fruits, and by artisans, such as jewelers, tapestry weavers, and furniture decorators, in pattern books recording their floral designs. The increasing sophistication of techniques of plant illustration in the 18th century culminated in the development of color printing. The library owns copies of works by Redouté, the first artist to exploit fully the potential of color printing of stipple engravings in such renowned books as Les Roses or the multi-volume Liliacées, and works by other masters of the period, including Georg Dionysius Ehret’s Plantae et papiliones rariores, 1748-1759.

In addition to printed books, there is a collection of manuscripts and drawings covering the same range of topics – a late 17th-century planting plan for an Italian garden; Hans Puechfeldner’s fine images of late 17th-century mannerist gardens; a number of paintings by oriental artists executed for western patrons to record discoveries of new plants made during the expansion of Europe into the East. The Library owns the original watercolors for Buchoz’s Collection des Fleurs dans les Jardins de la Chine as well as the gouaches by Clara Maria Pope for Samuel Curtis’s Beauties of Flora. Watercolors by Redouté, among other artists, a diminutive late 16th-century manuscript of flower illuminations attributed to Jacques le Moyne, and an early Italian manuscript herbal are just some of the library’s treasures.

The collection continues to be developed. Noteworthy acquisitions from recent years are Francesco Colonna’s La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, 1545 edition; Salomon de Caus’s La pratique et demonstration des horloges solaire, published in Paris in 1624; and Humphry Repton’s album of 500 engraved views taken from William Peacock’s Polite Repository, arranged by year.

The garden rare book collection is both a unique tool for historical inquiry and a testimony to the enduring human delight in gardens and garden creation, which is, as Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “the Purest of Humane pleasures.” It was a claim echoed by Mrs. Bliss, whose testimony to the value of gardens and scholarship is inscribed upon the exterior walls of her library.