In June 2023’s Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs auction, travel was a clear winner with several of the top lots originating far overseas.
The Balfour Album crowned the sale, selling for £112,700 and comprising 26 stunning 19th century watercolours by Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Karraya, one of the leading practitioners of Company School painting. Shaykh Muhammad was active in the second quarter of the 19th century and is acknowledged as 'by far the most talented and original' of all Calcutta painters specialising in work for the British at the time. Collections as extensive as the album included in our June 2023 auction are rarely seen, contributing to its desirability.
A manuscript copy of Shahnameh – the Persian ‘Book of Kings’ – with 32 miniatures, fetched £27,700. This imposing manuscript copy of the Persian national epic was of a notably early and auspicious date - completed two years after the foundation of the Safavid dynasty by Shah Isma'il I in 1501, which re-established Persia as an independent political entity for the first time since the Arab conquest.
A 17th century manuscript portolan chart of the Mediterranean sold for £18,900, while a near-complete set of Henry Salt's spectacular aquatints of Views taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia and Egypt, sold for £10,710.
The sale took bidders on a tour from Scotland to India, to America and the Polar Regions, and this certainly captured imaginations!
Modern classics are also performed very well: a signed later edition set of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings sold for a grand total of £16,380, with seven lots of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books selling for a combined total of £11,900.
All sold prices include buyer’s premium.
