Full Morocco
1873
by Dickinson, Janie
1873. Full Morocco. Very Good Plus. 4to. 25 by 21 cm. 41 leaves of heavy card, with content entirely on rectos. Of these, 28 have have finished pen-and-ink work. Generally the original artwork is intended to carry forward the theme of the print, or complement it in some way. Some of this original artwork is a highly developed pictorial image which dominates the page, while in other instances it is more a servant to the print, or meant merely to be ornamental, as when the penwork is directed to framing the print, with the ornamentation very precise but not having any particular pertinence to the print image per se. The albumen prints are themselves unexciting reproductions of artwork -- paintings and sculpture -- as was the common form of such reproduction at the time, and the ancestor of today's museum postcards. It is the additional artwork, by Miss Dickinson, which brings the album alive. Especially appealing are her drawings of foxhunting scenes, above and below the albumen print of a fox painting, her scene of the Nile, above a print of a bedouin and camel, her drawings of three seraphs to frame the print of a painting of a pretty boy, her drawing of a small catastrophe with a toppled farm cart, her other bucolic landscapes, which include ruins, church steeples and the like, her raging snake to enhance the painting of an exotic woman, her Venetian atmospheric drawing. But one should not short shrift the appeal of the more purely ornamental drawings of frames, some of which are quite clever and all of which are intricate in their detailing. Light wear to the red morocco.
(Inventory #: 005344)