File:SB-01-118-source-1.jpg

Summary

Description

View Above Sweet Brier. Wood engraving published in Philadelphia and Its Environs, and the Railroad Scenery of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1875), printed p. 71. A wooded river landscape with a towpath and small boats, enclosed by an arched outline. The artist and engraver have not been securely identified.

The composition matches the engraving in H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 1, page 118, item 1. The original caption and small signatures within the engraving are retained. This is an external source scan, not an altered album image.

Source

The Library of Congress, copy digitized and made available through Internet Archive, identifier philadelphiaitse00jb, ark:/13960/t3nv9r31g; catalogue LCCN 01010600.

• Internet Archive book record.
• Complete source leaf in the book viewer.
• Original full-resolution JP2 scan.
• Scan metadata, including the printed-page mapping.

Printed p. 71 corresponds to scan leaf 101 (zero-based) and page 101 of the available PDF (one-based); these are different numbering systems. Thanks to the Library of Congress and Internet Archive for making this historical material freely available.

File and processing

JPEG, 1227 × 1485 pixels, one engraving with its original caption. Prepared directly from the original RGB JP2 scan, 4368 × 2912 pixels, rather than the PDF's compressed, layered representation. The source JP2 was retained unchanged.

The scan was transposed 90 degrees clockwise without resampling. It was then deskewed 0.81 degrees clockwise with one bicubic resampling, following the scan metadata and checking the caption visually. The crop in the deskewed 2912 × 4368 image is (1138,575)–(2365,2060). The complete engraving, small signatures and printed caption are retained; the running header, adjacent prose and other illustration are outside the crop. No enlargement, colour or tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. The natural paper colour remains.

Source JP2 SHA-256: a6de6eae567ddc1d9a8245023a802b553a9ee752fe7ec39e68fffe30d1dacc6d.

Dating and limitations

The 1875 book is the earliest matching publication located in this research. The same matrix also appears in Illustrated Guide to Fairmount Park, and the Centennial Exhibition Grounds and Buildings (1876), p. 9. Neither occurrence establishes the first publication of the engraving or the physical source of the scrapbook clipping. No attribution is inferred solely from an uncertain reading of a signature.

Rights

Public-domain historical engraving, published in the United States in 1875. This statement is based on the publication date; it is not attributed to a Creative Commons licence or a rights label supplied by the Internet Archive record. The digitizing institutions and exact source are credited above.