HAMILTON, George

'Treatment of the Horse in Australia | by Geo Hamilton 1864' [a complete suite of 11 photographs mounted on captioned cards]

[Adelaide, The Author], 1864.

Eleven albumen paper photographs (approximately 88 × 134 mm), mounted on the recto of individual cards (approximately 165 × 240 mm), neatly captioned below the plate, with the title at the head of the first one (with all captions by George Hamilton himself).

A few light spots and marks to some of the cards; essentially in fine condition, with the photographs uniformly rich in colour.

The Art Gallery of South Australia has all 11 original artwork - pen and ink, with wash - in its collection. The 'Adelaide Observer' on Saturday 27 August 1864 contains a review of Hamilton's recently self-published book ('a well-conceived, well-written, neatly-printed and elegantly-illustrated brochure under the above title'). It describes at length the illustrations, '11 in number, photographed from the author's drawings by Colonel Biggs, Mr. Baines, and Professor Hall, and they bear ample evidence of the artistic taste as well as the correct judgment displayed in the spirited originals'.

Robert Holden ('Photography in Colonial Australia. The Mechanical Eye and the Illustrated Book', 1988) describes this book and one other (Molesworth Jeffrey's 'Various Exercises and Fragments in Metre by Divers Authors', Hobart, 1864) as being the 'first recorded use of original photographs as illustrations in commercially produced and dated books' in Australia. His descriptive bibliography records that the published work indeed contains 'Photographs of eleven drawings ... by Colonel Briggs [sic] from rough sketches by the author.... It would appear that these images were printed eleven to a sheet and then arranged in random order throughout the text'. His collation of the three copies in the State Library of South Australia indicates the individual print sizes range from 20 × 35 mm to a maximum of 40 × 60 mm.

The present offering clearly predates the published use of these images, and its presentation is much to be preferred. The first and most obvious difference is the superior size and quality of the prints. However, the captions greatly enhance the images; when they are read and viewed in the intended order (numbers 1-11 are lightly pencilled in the top right-hand corner of the cards), this becomes a proto-photobook of the highest order ... and far from being a prosaic account of how to look after a horse, as the title might suggest, it is a searing indictment of the widespread ill-treatment of horses. 'Mr. Hamilton proceeds with pen and pencil to describe and portray some of the trials a horse has to undergo from the time his liberty is first invaded in the bush until, in the last scene of all that ends this painful history, he is reduced to the drudgery of a hackney car'.

See Ferguson 10180b and 10181a; Holden 50 and 51, plus pages 13-21. Both bibliographies contain errors. [11 items].

Item #142931

Price (AUD): $15,000.00
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