A clean, wide-margined copy, on super thick paper, of Woolfe & Gandon’s fifth volume of ‘Vitruvius Britannicus’, with 100 finely engraved architectural copperplates of C16 to C18 English buildings. The complex printing history of this major architectural work begins in 1717, when vols I-II were published by John Smith and Colin Campbell (also the illustrator), then reprinted for various publishers until the 1750s, with the engraved titles and plates in various states. These vols, then followed by a third, were intended as ‘a carefully constructed “parallel” of the best examples of recent British architecture, measured against the works of Inigo Jones, who was “the yardstick by which to judge and compare the productions of all those who had built after him”’ (Millard II, pp.45-63). 

In 1767, the English architects John Woolfe (d.1793) and John Gandon published a continuation or supplement of vols I-III, which they marketed as vol.IV. This fourth vol. and the present fifth, published in 1771, were ‘calculated to launch the careers of two young architects’ (BAL); ‘their concern was not like Campbell’s to reform English taste, but rather to celebrate its superiority’ (Harris). The present vol. V includes mostly buildings executed after 1750, such as Witham, Wrotham Park, Oakland House and Harwood House, by contemporary architects like John Donowell. The letterpress text, in English and French, describes the plates for each building, specifying the owner’s name and adding at times a topographical delineation of the surroundings or a description of its private art collections (e.g., at the Earl of Spencer’s Wimbledon Park). ‘The unexpected plates of the C16 Longford Castle and those of Coleshill, attributed to Inigo Jones, were a present from the owner of those houses, William, 5th Earl of Radnor, ‘a great encourager and promoter’ of Woolfe and Gandon’s book and of the works of other English artists’ (Harris).