[Photography]. [Portraits. Royalty and Nobility. Europe]. La - Lot 29

[Photography]. [Portraits. Royalty and Nobility. Europe]. Large album in-4 (ca. 42 x 33 x 6 cm.), [ca. 1895-1910]. Brown basane, embossed boards adorned with floral decoration with geometric framing, cold, remainder of metal clasp, spine renewed in recent brown chagrin and mute (defects including cover of lower board detached; tears on the supports of q. photos; q. images a little insolated). Important album offering a catalog of the crowned heads of Europe at the time of its composition. It is the work of a Danish amateur, who captioned all the portraits, and enlarged the collection with 2 handwritten tables giving for each nation its sovereign, its surface area and the number of its inhabitants. It comprises 132 photographic portraits, 116 of them in 15 x 10 cm format, mounted on the publisher's cardboard, and a few medallions, all set in specially designed cardboard folios. The plates and albumen prints were produced and published by various European workshops. The northern and Germanic monarchies are the most amply represented, with the volume opening with the kings, queens and princes of Norway and Denmark, followed by the German states. Among the most famous figures are Alexander III and Nicholas II of Russia, Empress Maria Feodorovna, Emperor Frederick William I of Prussia, Queen Victoria of England, Umberto I of Italy, King Leopold II of Belgium, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, Elisabeth (known as Sissi), Napoleon III, Ludwig II of Bavaria...; portraits of other sovereigns are perhaps rarer: Carol I (Romania), Georgios I (Greece), Milan, Alexander and Natalia of Serbia, the Brazilian Pedro II of Alcantara, Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey, Nasser el-Din, Shah of Persia, and four US presidents: Grover Cleveland, Ulysses Grant, James Garfield and Chester Arthur. A handwritten, loose-leaf table and a photographic plate with portraits of the Emperor of Japan, the Empress and leading nobles and officers are included.