Item Details
Victorian Family Album.
England: nd [circa 1860s]. Unique. Hardcover. Unusual Victorian family scrapbook, c.1850-70 c. 100 photographic images, most original, some cut from magazines, mounted onto thick paper with hand-drawn illustrations and captions in pen and ink.
A stunning nineteenth-century photograph album, heightened with exceptional coloured illustrations of birds, snakes, lizards, insects and flowers. The star of the work is its compiler Charles Johns Sampson, who appears many times in contexts both serious and humorous; one collage pastes his face onto various cartoonish bodies, including an alabaster angel: ‘His future state’. The illustrations are exceptional, with an abundance of reptiles and tropical scenes, creating lush frames to the otherwise sombre Victorian poses.
Beyond the family portraits are a strikingly modernist design for a stained glass window, a page celebrating the British royal family on the death of Prince Albert, and a collage commemorating the American Civil War, with cartoons, confederate generals and ‘the rival presidents’ Davis and Lincoln. The work concludes with a composition with photographs of African men captioned for “Is he Not a Man & and Brudder // Dedicated Moste Respectfully to ye society for ye Gospel Its Propagation In Ye Heathen Countries”…which combines the text from the first and most identifiable image of the 18th century abolitionist movement of a kneeling African man with the phrase “Am I not a man and a brother?” together with a play on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [founded in 1701 as a missionary society to provide clergy from the Church of England to minister to the settlers and to convert nonbelievers in the colonies]. One of the very best we’ve seen. Very Good+. Light shelf/edge wear, one tipped in photo missing, else tight, bright, and unmarred. Half bound diamond tooled burgundy leather, marbled boards with gold lines. 4to. np. Illus. (b/w photos and pen and ink sketches, color illustration in ink and watercolor. Item #13539
Price: $5,500.00