Lot 508
ATTRIBUTED TO PIERRE JOSEPH ROSSIER & OTHERS, A RARE AND EARLY ALBUM OF ALBUMEN PRINTS
CHINA CIRCA 1859
Books, Maps, Photographs & Manuscripts
Auction: 12 July 2005 at 13:00 BST
Description
Pierre Joseph Rossier and others: A rare and early album of Shanghai, of 79 albumen prints, mainly subscribed with hand-written captions, a few dated 1859; 39 (including 2 two-plate panoramas) being derived from whole-plate size (8½x6½ inches/216x165mm) and five others plus one three-plate panorama being derived from 8x10 inch/200x240mm. together with 31 individual or group portraits of various sizes.
Loosely inserted, a further two topographical studies, and four untrimmed and unmounted stereo pairs, two topographical and two portrait subjects.*
Subjects include topographical studies of Shanghai and the surrounding area, and portraits including Lord Elgin, Minister to China; D. Booth Robertson, HIM's Consul, Shanghai; Baron Gros, French Minister to China; Chinese dignitaries; etc.
The album, shaken and with morocco covers complete but largely detached, gold-stamped Album Chinois, is incribed in the hand of Mrs. W.S. Brown. It was in 1853 that William Seton Brown moved his family from Calcutta, where they had been resident, to Shanghai, where Brown took over the general trading firm of Birley, Worthington. The album descended through the family to the present owner.
There are few known photographs of China prior to the arrival of Felix Beato and other photographers in 1860, around the end of the Second Opium War. However, a leading historian of photography in the Orient, Terry Bennett, has identified a Swiss photographer, Pierre Joseph Rossier, as having taken "the first commercial photographs" in China and Japan and places him in Shanghai at around the date of the album. Notably, in addition to the title Album Chinois, part of a French watermark may be seen in one of the loosely inserted prints; according to Bennett, Rossier was from French-speaking Switzerland.
*One of them identified as L. Dunlop. Ludovic Grant Dunlop, 1834-65, worked for the trading firm of Rathbone & Co. of Liverpool & Shanghai in the latter half of the 1850s.