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The John Howell-Kenneth Hill copy of what is likely a preliminary issue of Edward Vischer's album of photographs of his drawings of California landscape. This copy is complete as issued, containing all the plates called for in the general table of contents, but lacking the accompanying text volume except for three leaves that have been inserted along with the preliminary matter. It is unknown why this particular copy was assembled in this way, and we cannot locate any comparable copies, but Palmquist and Kailbourn note: "Vischer was perennially generous in distributing custom-assembled albums of his art, both original works and photographic reproductions." It is possible that it numbers among the twenty copies that Vischer initially sold by subscription, before offering an expanded version in a variety of formats. At the very least, this seems to be an early state of Vischer's PICTORIAL OF CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE. Including a photographic map of California tipped-in to a blank preliminary leaf, this copy contains 115 mounted photographs, in the following groups: sixty numbered photographs arranged in five series, each preceded by a printed contents leaf; twenty-eight unnumbered plates preceded by a printed section-title, "Trees and Forest Scenes"; twenty-six unnumbered plates preceded by a printed section-title, "Supplement. Grand Features and Characteristic Ranges of Californian Scenery." Vischer created the drawings that he photographed for this album between 1858 and 1867. Featured are photographs of his drawings of missions, ranches, landscapes, towns and small settlements, buildings, the Big Trees, scenes in the Sierra Nevada, passes and summits, and Lake Tahoe. A few images feature camels among the mammoth trees or in Carson Valley (an experiment of the 1860s). The first sixty images are affixed to mounts bearing a printed copyright notice of 1863, and a few of the mounts in this grouping feature the blindstamp of San Francisco photographer George Howard Johnson, whom Vischer contracted in the early 1860s to photograph his work (as noted by Palmquist & Kailbourn). The final "Supplement" section features photographs of art not only by Vischer, but also by Thomas Hill, Thomas Ayres, and other artists, as well as drawings by Vischer of Yosemite photographs by Carleton Watkins. Edward Vischer emigrated from Bavaria to Mexico at age nineteen and worked for a commercial house as a supercargo on voyages to Pacific ports in the Americas and in Asia. He visited California in 1842 before returning in 1849 to settle in San Francisco as an importer, merchant, realtor, and commission agent, and from early on he began making sketches of the natural wonders of his new home. In the 1860s he began experimenting with ways to reproduce his art, first using lithography, but he soon became disenchanted with the ability of the lithographs to faithfully reproduce his artwork and by the tendency of the lithographic stones to break. As a result, Vischer began to photograph his drawings, issuing the photographs in published albums. "Although evidently not a photographer, Edward Vischer was one of the first people to foresee the possibilities of photography as a means of reproducing fine art in books" - Palmquist & Kailbourn. Cowan praises Vischer's drawings as "superb," and notes that "few copies contain precisely the same number of plates," an assessment with which Currey & Kruska concur. In fact, after the initial offering of twenty subscription copies, Vischer issued a prospectus advertising the book in four formats, with between 100 and 120 plates. However, copies are known with more than 120 plates, and one recorded copy contains 200 plates. "How many were sold is not known, but the costly nature of the work and the difficulty of procuring uniform sets of prints indicate that the number was small, an indication borne out by the present scarcity of examples of Vischer's work" - Farquhar. "[Vischer's] most ambitious and complex work.Because of hi.
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