Lot 243
Victoriana
Photocollage album, c.1880
£1,197
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs
Auction: 19 June 2024 from 10:00 BST
Description
Folio dark blue half morocco album with compiler's name (Con Pilcher) gilt to front board, 37 thick card leaves (34.8 x 26.4cm) containing designs in watercolour, pen-and-ink, pencil, and oil (rectos only), incorporating in total 88 pasted-in albumen-print portrait photographs, many trimmed to outline of head, subjects captioned in ink and including Napoleon III, Empress Eugenie, Louis-Napoleon Prince Imperial, Georgina Countess of Dudley (Victorian society beauty), Patsy Cornwallis-West (mistress of Edward VII), soldiers (Sir Evelyn Wood; Lord Chelmsford, Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Garnet Wolseley), actors and actresses (Eveleen Rayne, Violet Cameron, Ellen Terry, Connie Gilchrist, Florence St John, Lily Langtry, Kyrle Bellew), and others including Con Pilcher (depicted in an ink and wash sketch playing the lute), most of the designs signed and dated and including whimsical jeux d'esprit in addition to botanical and natural history backgrounds, 9 further photographs mounted to rear endpapers
Provenance
With a letter dated 2019 from a previous owner noting that ‘the Pilchers were a theatrical family with connections to celebrities of the time such as Ellen Terry’; according to the same letter Constance Pilcher's married name became Freeth.
