A Collection of Eight Early "Hicrome" Color Photographs, circa 1914-16

A collection of eight rare "Hicrome" color photographs. Each print measures over 4" x 6", neatly mounted in a studio mat frame with tissue guard, laid down inside a thick paper portfolio (7" x 9") with a blind embossed pictorial device on the front cover. Most have a paper label on the back of the mount: "Hicrography: Hess-Ives Color Photograph / Hicrome: A color photograph", including a patent dated 1914; two prints have a separate paper ticket listing patents dating from 1903 - 1916. The collection consists of one image of a wedding couple taken outdoors, one large outdoor family portrait, three duplicate copies (in variant colors) of a woman in a drawing room, two duplicate copies of a young couple seated in front of a grove of trees with two open tents, and one copy of an older couple seated in front of the same woodland and tents. One duplicate print is partly damaged with a stain at the lower right corner, else very good or better overall with a few small tears and chips at the edges of the portfolio covers and tissue guards. Although Henry Hess's surname received top billing as President, the creative genius behind the landmark photography firm, Hess-Ives Corporation, was the inventor Frederic Eugene Ives. In the 1890s he developed a photochromoscope camera capable of producing color photographs from three sensitized plates. Exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in London, Ives was awarded a RPS fellowship as well as several scientific medals of achievement. In 1911 he partnered with the entrepreneur Henry Hess to form the Hess-Ives Corporation, which pioneered "hicrography," a unique dye imbibition color printing system. The dye imbibition process did not become commercially viable until the 1940s, when Kodak further developed the process under the "Dye Transfer" product trade name. A nice cache of well-preserved, scarce color prints taken before the First World War, each displaying a remarkable clarity of contrasting colors. Only one other Hicrome color photograph by Ives, a 1905 portrait of Mark Twain, has come up at auction in 2011.…