Cloth
Cloth. Good. Beautiful collection of original watercolors of birds and flowers on bolting cloth. Besides the botanical and ornithological paintings, there are three picturesque paintings of children in the Queen Anne-style vein evocative of illustrators such as Kate Greenaway. N.d., late 19th century or very early 20th century. Folio, 36.5 by 29 cm. Unpaginated, 24 leaves (48 pages). 64 different swatches with original watercolors on the bolting cloth swatches, 36 of which we would describe as larger swatches, 28, as smaller ones. These are mounted, rather crudely using pieces of labels to hold the swatches into place. The album would appear to have been compiled by a business and was thus essentially a salesman's sample catalogue. Being created for an utilitarian purpose, the album was never meant to be anything but the scrappy-looking compilation that it is. To us, though, it is a rather singular survival that is correlative to wallpaper books, fabric sample catalogues and the like yet also different, and we have never seen anything quite like this before. The scrappiness of the assemblage belies the beauty of the designs, we would stress. Also included are five skeins of thin antique yarn with Asiatic dyes (pink, purple, gold, beige) made by Brainerd & Armstrong and called Roman Floss. (These are separate, in a plastic mylar sleeve.) Condition: binding worn and soiled. Some leaves loose, as are some swatches from the pages to which they were mounted. A few swatches were probably never mounted.
(Inventory #: 006052)