Item #1561 Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture
Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture

Photographic Groups of Eminent Personages — A Victorian Photomontage of Fame and Culture

Item #1561

London, ca. 1875–1890
10 5/8 × 13 1/8 inches, portrait orientation.
Red publisher’s morocco with elaborate gilt titling and blind embossing; gilt-edged leaves.

A most unusual Victorian assemblage—part scrapbook, part cultural atlas—bringing together the defining faces of 19th-century Britain and Europe. Seven large sepia composite photographs, each comprising roughly one hundred tiny portraits, collectively map the intellectual, political, and artistic pantheon of the era. Each photographic plate is paired with a matching numbered key: a printed, diagrammatic guide that identifies every sitter by name and occupation.

Contents:

Celebrities in the Church, Science, Literature, and Art – 103 portraits, all male. Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, H. Rider Haggard, Gustave Doré, Pasteur, Ruskin, Dickens, Twain, Browning, Zola, Ibsen, Holmes, and others.

Modern Celebrities: Political, Legal, &c. – 113 male figures: Gladstone, the Rothschilds, Balfour, Randolph Churchill.

Group of Divines of the Church of England – 79 portraits, all clergy; includes the Wilberforces and Wordsworths among other Anglican, Irish, and Scottish divines.

Musical, Operatic and Dramatic Celebrities – 78 women of the Victorian stage: Lady Macbeth, Medea, Mary Queen of Scots, Carmen, etc.

Eminent Women: Historical and Literary – 94 portraits, from queens to authors: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, Lady Butler, Madame Blavatsky, and the assassin Charlotte Corday.

Musical, Operatic and Dramatic Celebrities – 87 mixed portraits, male and female. Arthur Sullivan, Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, D’Oyly Carte, et al.

Historical Celebrities – 81 Renaissance and Enlightenment men of letters and art, each identified in brief.

All photographic collages remain clean and firmly mounted. The key sheets—each on thick paper—show expected age wear: folded corners, edge chipping, and partial separation along binding folds, but all are present. The gilt-tooled cover retains strong visual appeal; spine and corners rubbed yet stable; back board embossed with title in blind and in sound condition.

A fascinating artifact from the dawn of mass media and the cataloguing of fame—an early attempt to visualize celebrity, intellect, and influence in photographic form.

A striking survival—part photo-book, part cultural compendium—for historians of Victorian media, photography, or the formation of “celebrity.”.

Price: $800.00

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