BERG, JOH. AUG.
Bilder ur svenska folklifvet. Tolf teckningar efter originaler af B. Nordenberg, K. Zoll, J. W. Wallander, J. Höckert och B. Wennerberg. Utförda i tontryck af Arnz & Co. i Düsseldorf. Svenska texten af Joh. Aug. Berg., Fil mag. Innehåll: (....).
Götheborg. D. F. Bonniers förlag. 1855. Folio (39 x 50 cm.) Title + (24 pp.) + 12 plates in colour lithography. Black cloth with green cloth spine and cornes. Title in gilt at the front board. Rebacked. A tear to the margin of the title. Two text leaves with a tear into the text. A couple of text leaves with a minor tear to the margin. Four plates with a tear to the margin. A few text leaves and plates with a water stain in the lower margin, at one leaf into the text. Some of the guard papers creased and with small losses. In spite of this, an unusally clean copy. The text and images in this copy are clean.
¶ Beautiful lithographs showing country life in Sweden in the mid 19th. century. The images have a warm, soft and inviting feeling about them. Charming scenes of the interior of a Sami hut, religious fanatics in the far north, a wedding, a harvest, a horse market, smugglers on the west coast etc. Two pages of text to each picture with paralell text in german, swedish and english. The captions at the plates are also in swedish, german and english. The originals were painted by some of the best artists of the country at the time. The paintings are in line with the Düsseldorf School - romantic country scenes and peasant life. By the mid 19th. century it was apparent that the old way of country life rapidly was disappearing as the industrial revolution swept across Europe. All over the continent artists travelled the countryside to depict the old ways before they were gone. This album is a swedish example of this movement. (Bonniers later published a similar album in 1864-1865, "Svenska Folket som det ännu lefver wid elfwom, på berg och i dalom" containing paintings by the artist Wallander only.) The plates were printed by Arnz & Co. in Germany and probably the first imported colour lithographs to be published in Sweden ( the plates in Skogmans "Fregatten Eugenie is a close second). The publisher, Bonnier, called his colour plate book "the most beautiful and brilliant in Sweden". In fact, it was probably one of the most costly and advanced works of the time. 1500 copies were printed.
· HAM1469 · Hammarlunds Antikvariat, Stockholm (SE) ·
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