A small quarto album illustrated with original photographs (including three by Frank Meadows Sutcliffe) and mounted watercolours that celebrate the compiler’s English travels. Uniformly laid out with a watercolour bouquet on the recto of each leaf opposite a mounted photograph backed by more greenery and flowers, the album begins in Ilkley, Yorkshire, continuing via Whitby, Lowestoft, Devon and finally Weymouth with a dozen photographs by an unidentified photographer ‘CG’ showing the magnificent yachts off the south coast. A lovely format, well executed and with the added bonus of three photographs by one of late Victorian England’s major practitioners.
DESCRIPTION: bespoke binding of straight grain, green morocco (21x16cm); title to spine in gilt; all edges gilt. Marbled endpapers with gilt turn-ins; brown endpapers.
Single watercolour labelled ‘1888 to 1894’ laid down as a title page. The first five bouquets comes from Ilkley, opposite photographs of sailing battleships firing broadsides; there are two further bouquets from Whitby, illustrated by three original Frank Meadows Sutcliffe images of the harbour which must date from the late 1880s or early 1890s, probably bought directly from Sutcliffe’s studio in Whitby: harbour (14x10cm) the Whitby Jet Works (14x10cm) and another harbour image (9.5x7cm), all three trimmed and framed by floral decoration.
Three images of Penzance follow, then Sandown, Lowestoft (2 photos, the first showing a paddle steamer leaving the harbour), Alum, the Needles, Hurstmonceaux, Beachy Head, Ilfracombe (x2) Water’s Meet, Linton, Devon; Preston, Devon and finally to Weymouth with twelve photographs in total, including ’Seabell’ and the Prince of Wales’s legendary yacht ‘Britannia’, these photos initialled ‘C.G.’
