Felt. Decorated paper slipcase.
1813-1815 · Salzburg, Austria
Salzburg, Austria, 1813-1815. Felt. Decorated paper slipcase.. Very Good. Oblong, 9 by 14 cm. 12 leaves, a few with content on both sides, and each having an artwork of some kind. Five of these are watercolors applied directly to the paper (we would say original watercolors, although two are common images and so might well be copies), one pencil drawing, four hand-colored prints, one cut-out silhouette, and arguably the most interesting of all, embroidery into the paper, with the image thus on both sides of the paper (we are counting this as one piece). We would describe the album as a fairly typical example of a Germanic album amicorum of the period -- the Napoleonic era, or more loosely, the Biedermeier period -- with the textual entries written invariably in neat yet now inscrutable hands -- the style of cursive writing is now obscure. The original pictorial content is also of a high quality, not that that is also not fairly typical of the genre. Again, we would consider the embroidered specimen, which is of folk art-ish flowers and a hummingbird and sun, as the most unique. Other imagery is of flowers, a bucolic landscape, a funereal landscape with an urned monument at its center, as the norm. In fact, the silhouette is also a roughly similar funereal landscape. The other special aspect of this album is the green felt binding. The centerpieces are of a Roman chariots made of silver foil -- there is a slight variation to the image between the front and the rear cover, and around the perimeter of both sides is a silver foil tracery of flowers contained within a narrow band. The slipcase, which is also period, has also restrained classical decoration, in this case the center pictorial cameo is of seraphs. The slipcase is moderately soiled, and there is wear to the album itself. Minor loss to the silver foil.
(Inventory #: 005128)