Carte de Visite Photograph Album of the Members of the Royal Families of Europe

1868. Hardcover. Very Good. Cloth-backed album with wooden boards, upper board carved with a scene of a hunting dog and rifle in a woodland setting, brass clasps, a. e. g.; oblong 8vo, (160 x 240 mm); 25 heavy cardstock leaves, with two sepia albumen prints mounted to the recto and verso, labeled by handdated 1866-68 throughout. 100 photographs total. Spine rebacked, worn; inner hinges split resulting in detached. Photographs are nicely composed, exposed, and printed, and internally in excellent condition overall -- just a few instances of faint foxing or soiling. Compiled in Paris by a member of the Van Renssalaer family (according to a notation on the FFEP, with additional later ownership marking of Alma Sherman Phillips dated September 1931), this album includes solo and group portraits of men, women, and children, representing Russia, Austria, Prussia, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Baden, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, Wirttemberg, and England. A wonderul look at the size and extent of the royal families of 19th-century Europe, with a spectrum of elaborate costume on display.

The Van Renssalaers were an influential family of patroons in New York from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries; somewhat like the Livingston fand Schuyler families. Edith Wharton, who was a cousin, portrays them in"The Age of Innocence" as the Van der Luydens.