File:SB-04-198-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Socratic Chimpanzee and the Shallow Baboon. Monkeys converse on a branch above the fable, other monkeys read books down its left border, and a row of monkeys studies books at the bottom. The figures, branch, books, frame, printed title, complete text and moral, and CHURCH signature match the scrapbook illustration. The printed title reads Shallow Baboon; the museum catalogue title instead says Shadow Baboon. The printed wording is used here, with the catalogue discrepancy explicitly preserved. The source is a photograph of a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. Its outer mounting-paper outline is excluded; the complete inner printed frame is retained. Separate fragments from this composition have also been compared directly with volume 5, page 65, collage item 1: the row of book-reading monkeys is reused at upper left, the branch group at upper right, and individual readers lower in the central strip. This complete external source is shown separately; it does not reconstruct or replace the collage.

A printed cutting catalogued by Cooper Hewitt as 1878, illustrated by Frederick Stuart Church. The same composition is confirmed in G. Washington Æsop's Fables (New York: The World, 35 Park Row, 1878), printed p.19. The book title is dated 1878 and its copyright notice 1877. The catalogue status is Research in Progress; the catalogue date does not establish the first publication. The engraver is not securely identified here.

Compared directly with H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 4, page 198, item 1. The scrapbook image, handwriting, notes and transcription remain a separate witness. This matching composition does not identify the physical copy used for the scrapbook cutting.

Source

Natural-colour photograph supplied by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, accession 1938-57-1070-209, exact media CHSDM-57297_01-000001. Credit line: Bequest of Erskine Hewitt. Medium in the official record: Printed in black ink on paper.

• Museum object record.
• Persistent object identifier.
• Persistent identifier of this exact media view.
• Complete high-resolution museum photograph used for this crop.
• Matching Fables, 1878, printed p.19.

Thank you to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for preserving this material and freely providing its original photographs and Open Access metadata.

File and processing

PNG, 1360 × 2215 pixels, RGB. Original museum JPEG: 4506 × 5430 pixels, 13580048 bytes, SHA-256 3a9fc7e19cd62ceb7f57c4ecb00c023a8275e7bb6cb6279d2803cf3803de10e6.

Illustration crop in the upright image: (1285, 1290)–(2685, 3545). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.385947 degrees counterclockwise, measured from the long printed picture-frame bottom rule. Final trim (20, 20)–(1380, 2235); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete relevant composition, inner printed frame, title or signature where present, and meaningful source marks are retained. The outer mounting-paper outline is excluded. Original paper colour, show-through and scan artefacts remain. No enlargement, colour or tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. PNG compression is lossless; the source itself is JPEG. The complete source is linked above.

Rights

The saved official Smithsonian Open Access record, captured on 29 October 2026, specifies CC0 for this exact media view and its metadata. The underlying nineteenth-century printed illustration is public-domain historical material. The attribution, accession and credit line are retained above.