Cabinet of Paintings

George Baxter’s “The Pictorial Album or “Cabinet of Paintings”. Containing eleven Baxter images in oil colours. 71pp, 11 coloured plates including vignette on title page. London: Chapman and Hall, [1837]. 253 x 190 mm. Publisher’s binding of full straight-grain Morocco with elaborate gilt stamping on the covers and spine, red and green leather inlays, all edges gilt; boxed with tooled title to box spine. Minor scuffing and edgewear, first few leaves coming loose, some foxing but very good. First Edition, variant without the date in the title. One of the best examples of Baxter’s colour printing is The Pictorial Album. According to Geoffrey Wakeman, Chapman and Hall planned to issue the Album as a Christmas gift book in 1836, but “it missed the mark and was not published until 1837, with the result that it was a financial failure” (Wakeman, p. 9). Copies were issued in full Morocco bindings with inlays of red, green, yellow or blue leather, the colours of the inlays varying from copy to copy. This binding would have been primarily done by hand with the using of a stamping machine to create the elaborate gold tooling. Wakeman, Victorian Colour Printing (1981). The illustrations are – CL No 39 (Burns and his Highland Mary), vignette; CL No 40 (Cape Wilberforce, Australia); CL No 41 (The Carrier Pigeon); CL No 42 (Verona); CL No 43 (Cleopatra); CL No 44 (Lugano); CL No 45 (Interior of the Lady Chapel, Warwick); CL No 46 (The Boa Ghaut); CL No 47 (Zenobia);CL No 48 (Destruction of Sodom); CL No 49 (Jenny Dean’s Interview with the Queen); see all the images. It is a lovely copy, and if restricted to one Baxter work, this cannot be bettered.