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Roadsters' Album, The
London: Messrs. Fores, 1845. Item #02688
The Unique Copy with Henry Alken's Original Design for the Title-Page
Together with Alken's Hand-Colored Etched Proof Documenting the Creation
of One of the Great Sporting Pictorial Titles
NEWHOUSE, C[harles] B. [&] ALKEN, Henry. The Roadsters' Album. London: Messrs. Fores, January 2, 1845.
Second edition. Folio (14 7/8 x 10 1/2 inches; 379 x 268 mm.). Hand-colored aquatint pictorial title-page by Henry Alken, sixteen magnificent hand-colored aquatints by C. B. Newhouse, and eight pages of publisher's advertisements. Each plate printed on fine artboard and captioned with Newhouse's name and the Fores imprint.
Recently bound in an elegant period style in full dark green morocco, covers ruled in gilt with decorative corner-pieces surrounding a central blind-stamped panel, spine richly gilt in compartments, decorative gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers. A handsome copy.
An apparently unique copy, accompanied by Henry Alken's original signed pencil and watercolor drawing for the celebrated pictorial title-page, together with the original etched proof, hand-colored by Alken himself and inscribed on the verso: "To go with the original drawing / The Etched outline coloured by Alken Senr."
Few opportunities exist to follow so completely the creative process of a major sporting artist. Here, the evolution of the title-page can be traced from Alken's original watercolor design, through the etched proof personally colored by the artist, to the finished published aquatint that introduces the book. Together they form a unique record of nineteenth-century sporting book illustration in its successive stages of conception, engraving, and publication.
Originally published in 1836 under the title Incidents in Travelling, the work was reissued by the celebrated sporting print publishers Messrs. Fores in 1845 as The Roadsters' Album, distinguished by the addition of Alken's exuberant pictorial title-page.
Charles B. Newhouse devoted almost his entire artistic career to coaching scenes, road travel, and sporting subjects, and nowhere is his talent more fully displayed than in this delightful series of sixteen aquatints depicting the hazards, mishaps, humor, and excitement of travel on the great coaching roads of England.
The plates capture every aspect of coaching life: overturned vehicles, broken drags, forgotten passengers, overloaded mails, dangerous river crossings, snowstorms, sleepy gatekeepers, Gretna Green elopements, and desperate races against competing coaches. Each composition combines lively observation with remarkable technical assurance, preserving in vivid contemporary color the final flowering of the coaching age just before the railway transformed travel forever.
Messrs. Fores occupied a pre-eminent position among nineteenth-century sporting publishers, specializing in the finest coaching, racing, hunting, and equestrian prints of the period. The addition of Henry Alken's elaborate title-page was entirely appropriate, for no artist was more closely associated with the golden age of British sporting illustration. Richly populated with coaches, horses, coachmen, guards, and travelers, the title-page serves as a visual overture to the entire work and ranks among the most attractive pictorial titles produced for any English sporting book.
The accompanying original drawing elevates the present copy into an altogether different category. Original designs by Henry Alken prepared for published books are exceptionally uncommon; the survival of the corresponding etched proof, personally colored by the artist and explicitly identified as such, appears to be without parallel. Together they provide a rare insight into Alken's working methods and transform the volume into a unique archive of the artist's creative process.
No other copy has been recorded containing Alken's original artwork and working proof, making the present example not merely the finest copy of the book known, but one of the most important survivals relating to Henry Alken's published work.
References: Abbey, Life 407; Tooley 346; Siltzer, p. 192; Snelgrove, British Sporting and Animal Prints, p. 126, no. 4.
Price: $11,500.00