Advertisement for an apparently unpublished English collection of Jacque de La Joue the younger’s designs for rococo ornaments. Embellished with an elaborate asymmetrical rococo cartouche typical of the genre, engraved by John Rocque’s brother Bartholomew, who was better known as a horticulturist and landscape gardener based in Walham Green, Fulham. John Rocque, used many such devices in his maps, and sold at least one other book of ornaments, by Italian artist Gaetano Brunitti, from his premises in London and Dublin.

La Joue (1686-1761) was the son of a master mason, and well known as a designer and painter of decorative ornament and architecture. He was received into the “Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture on presentation of two imaginary architectural views in 1721 and, with the reestablishment of the Paris Salon, regularly exhibited decorative paintings there between 1737 and 1753. He was influenced by both Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and François Boucher (1703–1770), collaborating with the latter on a design for fireworks in 1729. La Joue’s decorative style epitomized the rococo idiom in France. Although his popularity waned towards the end of his career, his work remained one of the most important sources of rococo imagery and was widely reproduced in engravings” (Francesca Whitlum-Cooper for The Met online, 2010).

Rocque (c1704-1762) was also of French origin, a Huguenot exile, who probably came to London from Geneva in about 1728. Rocque lived in Great Windmill Street, on the edge of the French quarter, in Soho until 1743. After a fire destroyed everything he owned in 1750, he purchased new stock in Paris and re-established his business in the Strand, at the centre of the London map trade. His first publications were elaborate plans of the parks and estates of the monarchy and gentry; these were vanity publications, which survive in small numbers, but they served as a important introduction to wealthy patrons. He followed this with a series of important plans of English cities and towns. As with the estate plans, he was benefiting from the growing wealth in England after the War of the Spanish Succession.

The most important of Rocque’s town plans are his pair of London, the first ​’An Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, with the Country near Ten Miles Round’, published on twenty-four sheets in 1746, and ​’Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark’, on 16 sheets, published by John Pine and John Tinney in 1746. After his death in 1762, his business was continued by his wife, Mary-Anne.