Antiques Trade Gazette 43


the rooms


“Later annals of Diss may include the fact that for some years, in a long ago, pre-electronic age, it was the town in which ATG was literally pasted together and printed...”


Some pre-Pickwick capers


ROBERT Seymour’s Journal of a Landsman from Portsmouth to Lisbon on His Majesty’s Ship ––––, a curious collection of 14 coloured litho. plates (on eight sheets) and ten coloured vignettes published in 1831 by Thomas M’Lean, sold for £2600 at Dominic Winter’s March 2-3 sale. It was Seymour’s comic creations, especially those on hunting and fishing


Above: a rare comic representation of North Wales as an old woman with a sack on her back, Dame Venodotia Alias Modryb Gwen is a lithographed map of the region dating to c.1850, designed by Hugh Hughes and drawn onto stone by Joseph Josaiah Dodd. It was published by H. Humphreys. Dominic Winter, who sold this copy with its full period colour for £1250 on November 10, could trace only a few copies in institutional collections and none at auction in the last ten years.


Edifices in the City of Norwich of 1818. Keys of Aylsham, being local specialists, had valued it in a late July sale at just £150-180 – way below the sum it made on the day. The contents were loose in soiled and


worn boards and one of the plates after James Sillett was missing – which would perhaps account for the low estimate – but this copy went on to sell for £3200. A Royal Academy-trained painter,


antiquary and bibliophile, it sold this time at what would seem to be a record £3500. Almost 20 years ago a 1655-73 set


did make £3400 at Christie’s, but since then only limited edition, large paper copies of the edition of 1817-30 have made more. Going back to last summer it is


worth mentioning what must have been another record, as no copy appears in ABPC. This was a copy of Views of the Churches, Chapels and other Public


James Sillett, was born in 1764 in Eye. He was a member of what is known as the Norwich School, and served as President of the Norwich Society of Artists from 1815. He is best known for his exquisite still life works and more frequently seen at auction is his Grammar to Flower Painting of 1826. At Lawrences of Crewkerne on


January 17 another record was set, this time at £860, for William Coxe’s An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire. This was one of 60 copies on Royal paper, the two vols. handsomely bound in red morocco gilt. One lot that does not lend itself


easily to illustration was sold for £9000 at Mullocks of Ludlow on November


Continued on page 44


Bibliophile Sales Godalming


Contact Clive Moss: cmoss@bloomsburyauctions.com


Baverstock House, 93 High Street, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1AL t +44 (0) 1483 423567 f +44 (0) 1483 426392 godalming@dnfa.com www.dnfa.com/godalming


themes, and his suggestion for a textually-linked series of comic sketches about a sporting club, that prompted Chapman & Hall to commission what was to become, with broadened subject matter, the work we know as The Pickwick Papers. However, while there has been some controversy as to just how much Seymour influenced the Dickens book (see Seymour’s Wikipedia entry), he suffered from depression and shot himself with a fowling piece in the summerhouse of his Islington home before the second part of the original serial issue of 1836-37 was published. The other illustrations were supplied by R.W. Buss and, of course, Hablot K. Browne [‘Phiz’]. The two plates from the earlier seagoing work reproduced above and


below show the perils of dining on the high seas and unwitting (and unwell) passengers being soaked during the regular morning scrubbing of decks.


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