Late Victorian era British scrapbook of chromolithographic plates

This late nineteenth-century British album, created by an unknown author, features scraps, chromolithographic prints, and original artwork, with many images containing motifs of Orientalism and depictions of the colonial British Far East. Other common themes include fashion, religion, literature, and landscapes.

There are several examples of artwork in this scrapbook that appear to be original watercolor or hand-colored prints, featuring social castes of India, laborers, and characters in different occupations. These images include an elephant caravan, a shoemaker, a woman carrying shells, a Brahmin woman, a dressing boy, a barber, and a mother and child with baskets.

There is also a series of chromolithographic prints depicting English fashions from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including one that illustrates the costumes of members of a court of nobility. There several fashion prints of women in dresses made in 1809 by John Bell.

Several color scraps and commemorative cards depict members of British royalty; among these depictions are Queen Alexandra, King Edward VII, Queen Consort Mary of Teck, and King George V. A monochromatic engraved illustration of HMS Conway, a wooden full-rigged training ship of the British Navy, also appears.

Several chromolithographic prints were originally published in “Album of Color Printing” by Alf Cooke; among these titles are “The Old Battlefield” and “Jon Anderson My Jo.” Color illustrations of anthropormphic animals by Harrison Weir taken from Alfred Elwes' The Adventures of a Bear, and a Great Bear too. Another series of chromolithographs were apparently taken from a single publication, including the prints titled "Self-Denial," "Old Age," "Youth," "Courage," "The Lifeboat," and "Justice."

Also appearing in this volume are five cigar box labels from Habana, Cuba, printed in color and gilded with gold foil; among the cigar makers represented are “Jose Alonso,” “Alvarez, Lopez y Ca,” and “La Flor De Jose Suarez Murias y Ca.”

One unique color plate depicts an actor dressed in an Elizabethan costume with a marginal description written in pencil, “Mr. Tree as 'Malvolio,'” and bearing the artist’s signature, “CHAS. A. BUCHEL.” This image is a reproduction of an oil painting by Buchel, depicting the actor, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, portraying the character Malvolio in his own production of “Twelfth Night” at Her Majesty’s Theater in London from 1901; this color plate was produced by Carl Hentschel Ltd, London, using the Hentschel-Colourtype process.

In the last quarter of the volume, a highly irridescent butterfly is affixed to a page. This is an actual insect and not a scrap.