File:SB-04-215-source-2.png

Summary

Description

The Hare and the Tortoise. A hare rests below a 10 MILE sign with an AESOP book beside it, facing a tortoise at right. The hare, ears, sign, book, tortoise, shell pattern, grasses, title, complete fable and moral, frame and hatching match the scrapbook illustration. The source is a photograph of a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. Its outer mounting-paper outline is excluded, while the entire inner printed frame is retained.

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.35. 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 215, 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 1938-57-1070-196, exact media CHSDM-57282_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.35.

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, 1349 × 2229 pixels, RGB. Complete source JPEG used: 4560 × 5437 pixels, 13079940 bytes, SHA-256 98868c9ba58fbdf534836f29ea170d61b3ae7e00acdd71908f486a9683156589. This is the complete high-resolution museum JPEG, matching the advertised media dimensions. The full photograph’s dimensions do not describe the resolution of the smaller pasted illustration.

Illustration crop (1265, 1405)–(2650, 3670). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.258157 degrees counterclockwise, measured from the long printed picture-frame bottom rule. Final trim (18, 18)–(1367, 2247); 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 outer mounting-paper outline is excluded; the entire inner printed frame is retained. 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.