Quarto. [20], 504pp. Title in red and black. With an engraved frontispiece and a further 69 engraved plates (numbered 1-71, several folding). Modern gilt-tooled half-calf, marbled paper boards. Minor shelf-wear, spine sunned. Marbled endpapers, verso of six initial leaves (including frontispiece and title page) and terminal leaf neatly strengthened to verso, one plate with repaired closed tears, some dampstaining, mostly to plates, scattered spotting, offsetting.

A reprint of the 1738 first edition in English of Dutch Golden Age painter and art theorist Gerard de Lairesse's (1641-1711) highly influential treatise Het groot schilderboek (1707), a valuable source for seventeenth century Dutch art.

Lairesse was celebrated in his lifetime as a painter and advocate for an idealising manner based on the study of classical antiquity. In 1664, after a scandal in connection with a broken marriage contract, Lairesse settled in Amsterdam where he became the leading exponent of the French academic style in painting. In 1690, due to congenital syphilis, he became blind and turned to art theory.