File:SB-04-214-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Dog and the Shadow. A dog crosses a plank carrying a bone; another dog struggles in the water below, while three smaller figures stand on the bank. The plank, dog poses, bone, water lines, splashes, reeds and complete printed picture frame match the scrapbook illustration. The printed numeral 4 below the picture is also visible in the matching Fables page; it and the light curved source mark are retained. Authorship of the curved mark is not assigned. To preserve these details, the outer boundary of the photographed cutting is retained as well. This is a photograph of a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. The full museum object has a different text-side view, The Lion and the Fox; this exact media01 is the dog picture. The separately pasted fable text, handwritten moral and circular face ornament on the scrapbook page are outside this picture crop and are not altered or attributed by this file.

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.49. 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 214, item 4. 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 1938-57-1070-188, exact media CHSDM-57273_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 public image-delivery JPEG used for this crop.
• Larger high-resolution JPEG advertised in the official metadata, 4572 × 5459 pixels; not used for this file.
• Matching Fables, 1878, printed p.49.

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

File and processing

PNG, 1159 × 1849 pixels, RGB. Complete source JPEG used: 3350 × 4000 pixels, 792251 bytes, SHA-256 34fcae50c10d6ff1107f3a1dad2ee5ffd4547d48fe66ad33df750509c82d3d91. This is the provider’s 4000-pixel-long-edge image-delivery representation, not the larger advertised 4572 × 5459 master. The full photograph’s dimensions do not describe the resolution of the smaller pasted illustration.

Illustration crop (750, 855)–(1945, 2740). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.186548 degrees clockwise, measured from the long printed picture-frame bottom rule. Final trim (18, 18)–(1177, 1867); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete relevant composition, printed frame, title and text where present, and meaningful source marks are retained. The complete outer cutting boundary is retained as well, so that the printed numeral 4 below the illustration and the curved source mark are not cropped away. The numeral also appears below the corresponding picture on printed book page 49; it is not the page number of this source. 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.