Louis de Carmontelle was an eighteenth-century French draftsman, painter, and garden designer. Beginning in 1783 he painted a series of panoramas on translucent paper that became a popular source of entertainment at royal court gatherings. These rolled-up transparencies ( rouleaux transparents ) were cranked through a backlit viewing box, and the “moving pictures” were accompanied by live storytelling that gave spectators the experience of journeying through beautiful landscapes. Presented chronologically, the transparencies show the evolution of eighteenth-century fashions and customs. The author re-creates the original viewing experience by leading the reader through a series of panoramic scenes, and, in the process, offers a lively analysis of social life in the 1700s. Drawn from both museum and private collections, the charming illustrations include gatefolds showing the full extent of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s  Figures Walking in a Parkland as well as many exquisite details of elegant outdoor gatherings and verdant parklands. The book presents all of Carmontelle’s extant transparencies, some of which survive only in fragments and a number of which have never been published.  "Merely by turning the pages of the book, one can get thoroughly lost in the eighteenth century.  The aristocrats assume a carefree demeanor in their expressions, and the gardens and parks in which they are depicted form perfect backdrops for the stories that unfold.”— The Magazine Antiques “This beautiful book illuminates the art of an underappreciated Enlightenment figure whose landscape transparencies anticipated the pioneering efforts of photographers such as Niepce and Daguerre to permanently fix the projected images of the camera obscura and the nineteenth-century vogue for panoramas.”— New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century  “This is the only publication in the English language that reproduces so well and so exhaustively the visual marvels of these transparencies . . . [making] them visible outside the private spheres to which so many of them have long belonged.”— Eighteenth-Century Life Laurence Chatel de Brancion is the author of Carmontelle au jardin des illusions and Cambacérés: Maître d’oeuvre de Napoléon .