£1,260
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs | 725
Auction: 8 February 2023 at 10:00 GMT
Large folio album, contemporary half skiver (backstrip detached and laid in), containing around 120 photographs in total, nearly all albumen prints (a few platinum or silver gelatin), most with dimensions of 21.5 x 27.5cm (4 larger, i.e. 27 x 37cm, a few smaller), mounted rectos and versos to stiff card leaves, contemporary manuscript captions throughout (many dated), ownership inscription dated Fort George, 1908 to front free endpaper. Contents comprise:
45 photographs of India and modern Pakistan including military operations (1891 Black Mountain/Hazara expedition), views (Abbottabad, Rawalpindi, Srinagar, Lucknow, and several of Murree and environs), group portraits (officers, non-commissioned officers, regimental sports teams, camp families, and children in fancy dress), regimental football matches at Murree, the 1894 Lahore durbar, officers' bungalows at Ferozepore and Rawalpindi, and similar;
approx. 60 photographs of Egypt, most by Gabriel Lekegian (1853-c.1920) and signed and captioned in the negative, a few by Pascal Bonfils, including ethnographic types ('Harem lady going for drive', 'Dancing dervishes', 'Arab woman', 'Fellaheen', trades including market sellers, basket makers, prickly pear vendor, 'conjuror', 'seller of water chatties', and date gatherers, 'Group of fellaheen in Egyptian village’, ‘An Arab Sheikh’, ‘Arab women on typical Arab cart’, ‘Archbishop and priests of the Coptic Christian church’, ‘Type of Bedouin’, ‘Poor woman in gala costume, Egypt’, ‘Young peasant girl, Egypt’, ‘Bedouin from Mount Sinai’, and similar) and Cairo views and monuments (tombs, mosques of Muhammad Ali, al-Azhar, Qaitbey, and Sultan Hassan, Ezkebiyah gardens, Kasr el-Nil bridge, Abdin palace, Shepheard’s Hotel, Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx and environs, and more);
16 military group portraits at Fort George (Scotland) and Cairo;
2 large-format photographs of drills at Cairo citadel and Fort George (27 x 37cm)