File:SB-04-043-source-1.png

Summary

Description

Cremation of the late Baron de Palm. A group gathers beside the cremation furnace at Washington, Pennsylvania. The figures, operator’s waistcoat, double semicircular retort doors, smoke curls, window, hats and floorboards match the scrapbook engraving. The complete printed frame and two-line caption are retained: Pennsylvania.—The Cremation, under the auspices of the New York Theosophical Society, of the body of the late Baron de Palm, at Washington, Pa., December 6th. From sketches by our special artists. The event date is 6 December 1876; the newspaper issue is dated 23 December 1876. The generic credit does not name an individual artist or engraver. The album’s handwritten identification of a figure is separate evidence; the external engraving does not establish Blavatsky’s attendance.

From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, vol. XLIII (43), no. 1108, 23 December 1876, printed p. 268, raw leaf 11 / PDF page 12. Both the physical issue masthead and p. 268 header have been read. The adjacent article is Cremation of the Remains of the Late Baron de Palm. The short news reference on p. 259 is a different location; this illustration is on p. 268. This exact matching publication does not establish the first appearance in all editions or the physical copy used in the scrapbook.

Compared directly with H. P. Blavatsky’s Scrapbooks, volume 4, page43, item 1. The album, its caption, handwriting, notes, transcription and previous sources are unchanged.

Source

Internet Archive, Serials in Microfilm, item sim_leslies-weekly_1876-12-23_43_1108, ARK ark:/13960/t3429hz16. Native processed grayscale microfilm JP2, not a natural-colour scan of the original paper or original camera TIFF.

• Exact digitized issue and reader.
• Complete native processed JP2 page used for this crop.
• Issue page-sequence metadata.

Thank you to Internet Archive and its Serials in Microfilm contributors for preserving this issue and making the primary scans freely accessible.

File and processing

PNG, 3475 × 2660 pixels, grayscale (L). Complete input: 4392 × 6248 pixels, 3367257 bytes, SHA-256 c363816362a0550d87e03e172ca9aae3d4cc656e6bfe337c74265be0fd6653d7.

Crop (550, 3020)–(4075, 5730) in the complete page. One bicubic alignment correction of 0.200803 degrees clockwise, measured from the robust bottom of long straight printed frame rule. Final trim (25, 25)–(3500, 2685); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is retained. Original grayscale values, print and scan marks remain. No enlargement, colourization, tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. PNG compression is lossless; the input is a JP2 access scan. A natural-paper-colour witness remains a future quality target.

Rights

Public-domain United States historical engraving published in 1876, faithfully reproduced in a microfilm access scan. The saved item metadata labels the publisher Out-of-copyright; it does not supply a Creative Commons licence or Public Domain Mark, so neither is assigned here. No modern colouring or newly created illustrative content is included.