Island of Love and Fisherman’s Rest, from Civil Architecture

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Situated between the military grounds of a royal city and a fortified encampment for elite troops, this island offers a quiet place for repose. Rising from the waters, a series of monumental terraces houses a menagerie of wild animals and birds in cages or in the surrounding woods. Lequeu painstakingly enumerated the many creatures in a series of lists. The island is surmounted by a temple of white stone paved in red jasper, which, as Lequeu notes, emits a rosy glow in daylight—an effect the artist had read about in an early eighteenth-century description of a castle in Ankara, Turkey.

Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826)
Island of Love and Fisherman’s Rest, from Civil Architecture, 1810–25
Pen and black ink, brown wash, watercolor
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la photographie