Great Exhibition (1854), Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 1854

[GREAT EXHIBITION]. Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. From the Originals Painted for H.R.H. Prince Albert by Messrs. Nash, Haghe, and Roberts, R.A. London: Dickinson Brothers, 1854.

Exceedingly fine proof impressions of Dickinson's views of the 1851 London Great Exhibition, the first world exhibition, one of the most defining cultural moments in modern technology.

Plates in this copy bear the identification in pencil of the artists, not all of whom were to be identified in the printed captions on the final version. It is conceivable that the artists were consulted at the proof stage and then signed the images themselves as both a marker of identification and approval of the proof. The Columbia University copy, also composed of proof impressions, has the plates similarly signed in pencil.

‘This deluxe edition was created to commemorate the 1851 exhibition in the Crystal Palace. Great Britain's Prince Albert had proposed a trade exhibition like no other before it, truly international, with the work of nearly 14,000 exhibitors from twenty-six nations on view. To house such an event, Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) designed a new type of building, using the latest in cast-iron and glass technology. Sited in London's Hyde Park, the landmark structure, 1848 feet long by 408 feet wide, was visited by more than six million people in the exhibition's five months. Public feeling for the temporary building was so strong that it was re-erected in South London, in enlarged form, the year that these volumes appeared. Fire destroyed the Crystal Palace in 1936.

‘Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures document the pomp and ritual in this resplendent space, and the exhibits from European bourgeois furnishings and modern machinery to an Arab tent from Tunis, draped with leopard and lion skins. Avery's [Columbia University's Art and Architecture Library] set of these spectacular large-format color plate books from the genre's heyday in the nineteenth century is a unique one. The fifty-five chromolithographs, with some details colored by hand, are in proof impressions, many signed in pencil by the artists’ (Jewels in Her Crown: Treasures of Columbia University Libraries Special Collections, no.66). Abbey Scenery 251 (not a proof set).

2 volumes, folio (680 x 520mm). 55 chromolithographed plates with very fine hand-finishing after Joseph Nash, Louis Haghe and David Roberts, in proof impression, most with printed designations 'Proof,' printed titles and some with printed imprint, most with pencil identifications of the artist, possibly by the artists themselves [see note below], guards (some spotting in margins to the plates, some light browning in text). Contemporary green half morocco, gilt-ruled borders, gilt spine in compartments, all edges gilt (rebacked with original spine laid down, light wear to extremities).