BASSET - Entree du château de Marly.

A so called optical print of the King's arrival at Marly castle. When Versailles is transformed to become the main residence for the King and his court, Louis XIV asks Jules-Hardouin Mansart to direct the site of Marly. The works began in 1679 and in 1686 they were well advanced to allow the King to live there. Louis XIV keeps on embellishing the park until his death.
The death of the King is the end of the golden age of Marly.
The maintenance of the park is too expensive, so it is completely modified during the Regency, and subsequently abandoned during the Revolution to be sold in 1799 to the manufacturer Saignel. He destroyed the castle to sell the building material when ruined in 1806.

Basset was a well-known publisher of optical prints, established in rue St.Jacques in Paris. With brief key list.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many popular speciality establishments in Paris, Augsburg and London which produced optical viewing devices and special engravings to be viewed through them. In the 18th century the optical print or vue optique came into existence, whose exaggerated converging lines were intended to produce the optical illusion of deep recession. The viewing devices for which these perspective prints were produced consisted of a lens and a mirror, this requiring the use of reversed or mirror-image pictures.