OLD COLONIAL HOUSES OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE (1900)

Publisher's original pictorial green cloth binding with gilt top edge.

viii + 16pp of letterpress with plans and sketches in text, followed by 34 plates (plate 28 used as frontispiece).

Binding tight. Contents clean. New endpapers. A very good example of this pioneer classic on Cape architecture.

'In referring to the "painful lack of the simple graces of the household in . . . beautiful Cape Colony," the author observes that "the Cape possesses old colonial buildings which still testify to the artistic feeling of the Dutchmen two centuries back." The volume contains thirty-four full-page engravings of the best examples of old Dutch houses "within a radius of fifty miles from Cape Town," together with descriptive notes accompanied by illustrations in the text. Amongst the most famous of these structures are "Groot Constantia," "Vergelegen," the hall of the Castle at Cape Town, the "Oude Pastorie, Paarl," "La Dauphine, French Hoek," and "Bosch-en-Dal." There is also a view of "Groot Schuur." - Mendelssohn Vol.II, page 527

'Alys Fane Trotter was born in 1863 and died in 1961. She and her husband lived at the Cape between 1896 and 1898. She explored the Cape Peninsula and environs by bicycle. On these excursions she made accurate visual and written records of the exteriors and interiors of a variety of Cape buildings. Her drawings, writings and archival researches awakened in others an appreciation of Cape colonial architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the need for its preservation.' - Foreword to the 1996 facsimile reprint