Collector's Edition: 496 pages, profusely illustrated in colour throughout, quarter-bound in Sakura red and orange cloth with a sunken plate image from the book on the front cover, all edges gilt, pictorial endpapers, contained in a matching slip case, a fine copy.
The Special Collector's Edition is limited to 40 numbered copies of which numbers 1 to 20 have a tipped in original plate, a soft ground etching, from, Daniell's Sketches Representing the Native Tribes, Animals, and Scenery of Southern Africa (1820).
This is copy Number 9 with the plate 'Bosch-Bok'.
Signed by the author.
From the Foreword: The book before you is both visually beautiful and historically important. It is about the life and work of Samuel Daniell (1775–1811), an English artist and traveller who visited the Cape and the island of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and who left behind him hundreds of pictures of the people, animals and landscapes that he encountered. What makes Daniell so significant is that he was an artist of exceptional ability, and the pictures that he made – sketches, watercolours and aquatints – far surpassed all previous visual representations of the Cape and Ceylon in their aesthetic achievement. Daniell's significance also lies in the fact that his pictures were the first to be produced and disseminated by a British artist of Britain's latest imperial acquisitions: the Cape (conquered from the Dutch in 1795) and Ceylon (conquered from the Dutch in 1796). His pictures were thus very important in shaping contemporary British perceptions of these new possessions. Equally, his pictures are important in revealing to us, his modern viewers, some of the attitudes and attributes of British imperialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact that Daniell's pictures were the first European representations of any accuracy to depict some of the indigenous people of southern Africa – the Khoisan of the Orange River, the Tlhaping of southern Tswana and the Xhosa of the eastern Cape. His pictures are thus not only a record of the moment of the earliest encounters between certain indigenous societies and European colonisers; they also provide a unique glimpse of the life and material culture of these societies before they were irrevocably transformed by the impact of colonisation. As such, they are of inestimable ethnographic value.
- Overall Condition: Fine
- Size: 2025
