[Yves-Marie de l’Isle, dit le Père André] - Essai sur le Beau. [Edition originale] - 1741

Original edition, rare, published anonymously, of one of the earliest true treatises on aesthetics written in French, authored by Yves-Marie André (known as Père André).

The work is one of the earliest treatises on aesthetics published in the French language, and one of the best books on these subjects before Baumgarten's. It distinguishes between absolute beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty—three orders of beauty which, in his thought, correspond to the three classes of innate ideas, adventitious ideas, and fictitious ideas, as accepted by Descartes.

An admirer of Father André's ideas on aesthetics, Diderot repeatedly defends the book — 'his essay on the beautiful is the most followed, the most extensive, and the best connected system I know. I would dare to assert that in its genre, it is what the treatise on the fine arts, reduced to a single principle, is in its own.' (The Beautiful, L'Encyclopédie - 1751) — he also details the thesis point by point in 1757 in Researches on the Origin and Nature of Beauty. The Essay on the Beautiful achieved immediate success and had a significant influence on the conception of aesthetics until the end of the 19th century.

Yves-Marie André, called Father André, joined the Jesuits in 1693. He first taught philosophy in Amiens, then at the College of Mont in Caen. However, because he showed too much attachment to the doctrines of Descartes and Malebranche, he was removed from this teaching position and assigned to a chair of mathematics in Caen.


Bound in an original full marbled calf binding from the period, with a spine decorated with compartments adorned with small gold tools, a garnet title piece with gilded lettering, and red speckled edges.
In good condition. Some rubbing on the covers, clasps, and cuts. Three corners pierced. Foot cap trimmed. Binding is quite solid. Interior is very well preserved, with rare foxing, white paper. The first 8 leaves are slightly creased at the margins. Handwritten note on the title page.

Yves-Marie de l’Isle, known as Father André
Essay on Beauty, where we examine precisely what constitutes Beauty in the Physical, in the Moral, in works of the Mind, and in Music.
Paris, Jacques Guerin, 1741.
in-12, (17 x 10 cm); 302 pages.