BONFILS Félix and others. - Lot 2

BONFILS Félix and others. [Album]. MESSINE. RHODES. ADALIA (ASIA MINOR). FAMAGUSTA (CYPRUS). BEIRUT. DAMAS. BAALBECK, MONT-LIBAN (SYRIA). JAFFA, JERUSALEM (PALESTINE). [Peloponnese and Levant], [1896-ca 1900]. Large square folio. With 249 black prints, 92 of them large format (8 x 11 cm to 22.5 x 28 cm), on 120 hand-numbered plates mounted on tabs. Contemporary red half-chagrin, smooth spine underlined by cold-stamped fillets, cold-stamped red percaline boards (some photos partly sunned in the small formats but without loss of motif, some lateral freckling on the first plates, binding a little rubbed on boards and edges). Impressive album, partly amateur, of 249 proofs, printed on albumen paper and mounted on strong cardboard. Each plate titled below the image, calligraphed in pen. Mixed with photographs from the Bonfils et Cie studio in Beirut (some with signatures), the amateur shots were taken by a passenger on the French liner Le Sénégal in the late 19th century. We can almost certainly date the terminus a quo of these shots, as the ship began its cruising career in the Peloponnese and the Middle East in 1896. MESSINA (10 photos), stopover in RHODES (16 photos), ADALIA in Asia Minor (18 photos), FAMAGOUSTE in Cyprus (20 photos), BEIRUT, DAMAS, BAALBECK and MONT-LIBAN in Syria (136 photos), ends with the cities of JAFFA and JÉRUSALEM (49 photos including a panorama of Jerusalem made of 2 photos facing each other in the album, 23 x 57 cm, with engraved title). The pictures show views, street scenes, architecture... Aïn Sofar, Great Mosque of the Omniades, Dervichery and fortress in Damascus, interiors and exteriors of the Chamieh and Abdallah-Pacha houses, English and German consulates, Méidan cemetery in Damascus, Hajj departure ceremony, cloth bazaars, Baalbeck acropolis, Temple of Jupiter, colossal statues, Ras el-Aïn river with Roman ramparts, caravan at El Mou'Allaka, Bednaya, quays and Arab boatmen at Jaffa in Palestine, Jerusalem taken from the Mount of Olives, chapels and Church of the Holy Sepulchre, tomb of Christ, sanctuary and master hotel in the Armenian Church... A 125 m mail liner, Le Sénégal, sistership of the Niger, was launched in 1870 at La Ciotat. Delayed by the war, she began operating on the South American line in 1872 and the Egypt-Syria and Africa line in 1888. It carried the first tourists of modern Olympism in April 1896 for the Athens Games. The Bonfils photographers were a French family in Ottoman Syria (now Lebanon), from 1867 to 1918. Renamed F. Bonfils et Cie in 1878, it was Beirut's first photographic studio. Three names appear in the captions: Mr. Plassard and Pauline (photographed in Rhodes) - Mr. Gabriel Hédé-Haüy (photographed in Famagusta and Damascus) - Mr. Rez Calla Khadra (Aïn-Sofar in Lebanon). [PHOTOGRAPHS]