Published with the greatest of all colour plate records of Indian and American frontier life and long attributed to Karl Bodmer, the Swiss artist responsible for the plates that are its true glory, the map is now thought to have been made by William Thorn and to be based on Tanner’s 1837 map of the USA. The Travels were first published in English in 1843, but while it is unclear from which edition this double-page map may have come, it must presumably date from the 19th century, as the map was not reissued with the rest of the plates in the Leipzig edition of the 1920s.
Portraits of North American Indians and birds were, as usual, among the most successful entries in the print section of the sale, but the lot that I have elected to illustrate, right, is something a little different.
Sold at $3600 (£2250) were two prints of Jewish interest published in Vienna c.1784, both of them etched plates by or after Giovanni de Pian. Both have been supplied with lengthy captions in Italian beneath the image, and while one of them, an interior view of a synagogue, is fairly self-explanatory, that reproduced here, showing a group of figures in a piazza observing the new moon, may need a little more elaboration. The caption states that it is customary for Jews to praise and bless the moon, and to jump with three breaths towards it, saying: “Just as we cannot approach you, so our enemies who want to offend us will not have a chance to do us harm.”
Mapping & Moon Gazing
A Ptolemaic world map from the Nuremburg Chronicle was sold for £12,000 (£7500) as part of a December 12 sale of maps and prints held by Swann, while bid to $6000 (£3750) was the Map to illustrate Prince Maximilien of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America reproduced right.
