Roland Belgrave Vintage Photography Ltd

TEYNARD, Felix. 

View of Sycamores and Encampment of a Caravan Bound for Sennar. Korosko. 1851/52

Salt paper print from a paper negative, mounted to the original page.
Dimensions: 237 by 295mm (9¼ by 11½ inches). 

£3500
Stock ID: 2323 

A civil engineer based in Grenoble, Félix Teynard traveled to Egypt in 1851-52 with the express purpose of updating the standard architectural reference on Egypt, "Description de l'Egypte," a lavish publication of oversized engravings issued by Napoleon's team of savants between 1809 and 1829. Teynard's survey, 160 salted paper prints with accompanying text, was published from 1853 to 1858 as "Egypte et Nubie, sites et monuments les plus intéressantes pour l'étude de l'art et de l'histoire".... Fewer than a dozen complete sets have survived.

Teynard photographed the sites from Cairo to Nubia with evident wonder at the engineering skills of the ancient architects and builders. He worked from multiple vantage points and had an uncommon grasp of the physicality of man-made constructions--their size and placement in space, their materials and decoration, and their state of conservation. His approach was graphically innovative, as is seen in one of his twelve views of Abu Simbel. This detail of the great temple shows the encroaching desert in the foreground and two of the four sixty-five-foot colossi--the largest in Egypt--cut into the sandstone cliffs. From a twentieth-century vantage point, the daring cropping of the head seems decidedly modern, a condition that Teynard acknowledged in the note accompanying the plate: "The vantage point was too low to allow inclusion of the head of the preserved colossus without distortion. For this reason, we preferred to take only the lower parts of the colossi, which can be completed by means of the next photograph, since they all depict the same person." 

Virtually all of Teynard's known photographs are affixed to mounts that credit his printmaker, H. de Fonteny, on the lower left margin. This photograph, however, is one of several rare examples stamped with Teynard's own name. It suggests that the photographer may himself have printed a set of negatives to complete the publication after de Fonteny's firm closed in 1854. 

Mongolia Photo Album

Twenty mounted albumen photographs showing the Russian colony in Urga, [now Ulaanbaatar], Mongolia, 230 by 380mm, four that are 107 by 230mm. 

Majority signed in the plate by the photographer, in Cyrillic, "Voradyev", with printed mounted captions in Cyrillic attached beneath  photographs, some staining to mounts, affecting four of the photographs, stored in presentation folio (530 x 380mm), morocco,  lettered in Cyrillic in gilt, watered silk liners, clasps.

The photographs are numbered in the captions from 71 to 90, suggesting that they are part of an incomplete set. However, a loosely-inserted accompanying booklet in Cyrillic, printed in 1891 and presumably issued with the collection, describes each photograph in turn and similarly numbers them from 71 to 90. 

Stock ID: 2609
£7000

Lombard-Venetian Railway

Inventaire Photographique et Statistique du Matérial roulant sur le réseau Vénetien et du Tirol Meridionale  1863.  Twenty-Nine albumen prints, mounted to album boards. Most circa 8,5 x 14 cm. Each with printed captions above/below images on the mount, bound in half-canvas album with gilt-lettered title page.

Rare documentary album illustrating the rolling stock of the Venice-South Tyrol railway network in 1863, compiled shortly before the region transitioned from Austrian to Italian control. The photographs present a comprehensive visual survey of mid-19th-century rail technology, featuring locomotives, passenger coaches, and freight wagons manufactured by leading European firms including Köchlin, Stephenson, Schneider, Cail, Haswell, and others. Each image is accompanied by printed captions detailing technical specifications, making the album a valuable industrial inventory. Produced during a moment of intense political and technological change, it offers a significant historical record of early railway infrastructure in Northern Italy and the former Austrian Empire. – 

Stock ID: 2645 Stock ID: 2645 
£3500

Charles Kroehle (1867-1902) 

Ethnographic studies of Indigenous people of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia 

Twenty-five albumen prints. Circa 140 by 100 mm. Seventeen signed by C. Kroehle in the negative in lower corners, 2 with the photographer's ink stamp annotated in pencil on the verso. Corner mounted in a 19th century small oblong album (200 by 260 mm) full morocco, titled in gilt ‘Album’.

Charles Kroehle is regarded as one of the pioneering photographers of the Amazon region. He participated in several expeditions through the Amazon Basin, Ecuador, and Bolivia, producing some of the earliest photographic records of Indigenous communities in these areas. 

Kroehle was the first to document the Peruvian Amazon on camera and is viewed as a pioneer of photography in this region. From 1888 to 1891 Kroehle accompanied Georg Hübner on trips to the Peruvian Amazon. Some of his images were later published by Fernando Garreaud in the illustrated book “República Peruana” (Lima 1900) – under Garreaud’s name, however.

The rare portraits presented here were taken primarily in the Peruvian Amazon and depict members of various Indigenous groups, including the Pirus (Río Pichis), Canelos (Río Pastaza), Múra-Pirahã (Río Pachitea), Huasheri (Río Napo), Campa (Río Palcazu), Cunibo (Río Ucayali), Lorenzo (Río Mayra), Cachivo (Río Pachitea), Chipivas (Río Ucayali), and Cashiva (Chonta Isla, Río Pachitea). 

Lit.: Musée du quai Branly. D’un regard l’Autre: Photographies XIXe siècle. Arles: Actes Sud, 2006, ill. p. 90.

Séverine Charon, ed. L’Amazonie disparue: Indiens et explorateurs 1825-1930. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005, ill. pp. 94, 95, 98, 100.

Stock ID: 2649
£12500

BOURNE, Samuel. 

Manirung Pass. 1866

Albumen print. Photographer's number 1468 in negative.

Samuel Bourne, the bank clerk and amateur photographer arrived in India in 1863 during the early years of commercial photography. Photographs taken during three expeditions to Kashmir and the Himalayas between 1863 and 1866 demonstrate his ability to combine technical skill and artistic vision. 

These views display a compositional elegance which appealed to Victorian notions of the ‘picturesque’; strategically framed landscapes of rugged mountain scenery, forests, rivers, lakes and rural dwellings. At Manirang Pass, 18,600 feet high, Bourne captured a sense of the tremendous upheaval of mountain geology and spectacular glacial scenery of the area. 

Dimensions: 235 by 295mm (9¼ by 11½ inches).

Stock ID: 2685
£3000

BEATO, Felice. 

Japan Album. 

Oblong Quarto (540 by 350mm), Fifty-five hand coloured albumen photographs (295 by 250mm) including a three-part panorama (Yokohama). Red cloth boards, spine decorated in gilt in six compartments, water staining to boards.

Stock ID: 2688
20,000 euros