File:SB-03-227-source-1.png

Summary

Description

A Domestic Scene, matching the Japanese family engraving in H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 3, page 227, item 3. A seated mother holds a bowl with two children; a small stool and vessel stand at left, with a tall plant at right. The three figures, hair partings, kimono patterns, bowl, stool, leaves and wall/floor hatching correspond exactly. The lower-left engraved mark is retained without expanding it into an unsupported engraver attribution.

Watching and Waiting on the album page is the title of a separate poem, not the title of this illustration. That poem, album wording and old sources are unchanged.

Source

Aimé Humbert, Japan and the Japanese Illustrated, translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey, edited by H. W. Bates. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1874, printed p. 43, caption A Domestic Scene. The same illustration is also used as the title-page vignette. The complete title page and p. 43 were personally inspected.

University of California Libraries, via Internet Archive, item japanjapaneseill00humb.

• Complete book and catalogue.
• Exact published native JP2, leaf 67 / printed p. 43.
• Title-page native JP2.

Earlier matching witness: Le Tour du monde, 1866, deuxième semestre, printed p. 32, caption Scène de famille — Dessin de Émile Bayard d'après une photographie. This primary caption credits Émile Bayard for the drawing; it does not name the photographer. BSB complete earlier page. The earlier scan is not the pixel source of this upload; the clearer 1874 book impression was selected for display. The earliest found witness is not claimed as proof of first publication or as the immediate physical source/date of the album cutting. No photographer is inferred from secondary literature.

Thank you to University of California Libraries and Internet Archive for freely providing the complete book and native scans, and to Bayerische Staatsbibliothek for the earlier primary-caption evidence.

File and processing

Lossless RGB PNG, 1420 × 1030 pixels, decoded directly from the original 2245 × 3212 JP2 and cropped to (340, 1170)–(1760, 2200), right/bottom exclusive. The complete vignette, floor marks, lower-left engraved mark and full English caption remain. The printed caption's main glyph baselines span only about three pixels; no further rotation was necessary. No resampling, enlargement, tonal adjustment, colourization, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction. Natural greenish-cream paper and minor age marks remain. Final decoded PNG pixels independently reproduce the source rectangle. Original JP2 retained unchanged, 392475 bytes, SHA-256 62cbc222da58faa6f09433b7e5d996d065d3aaa003a0e4d56fd6016fc2a79355.

Rights

The historical 1874 illustration is in the public domain. Current exact Internet Archive metadata names University of California Libraries as contributor and records NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT, verified 4 November 2026. No specific Creative Commons licence or Public Domain Mark is invented for this digitization. Changes: decoding to lossless PNG and cropping.