File:SB-04-246-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Unfortunate Elephant. An elephant stands among a group of birds and other animals beneath a tree. Its extended trunk, tusks, ears, the surrounding animals and beaks, branches, shadows, complete printed picture frame, CHURCH signature and hatching match the scrapbook illustration. The museum picture is already horizontal, like the scrapbook; the corresponding picture in the matching book is printed sideways. No 90-degree transpose is applied to this museum photograph. This is a photograph of a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. Its outer mounting-paper outline is excluded. The separately pasted title and fable text below the scrapbook picture are outside this crop and remain unchanged.

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.13. 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 246, 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 1938-57-1070-194, exact media CHSDM-57280_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.13.

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, 2176 × 1366 pixels, RGB. Complete original museum JPEG: 4529 × 5441 pixels, 14272342 bytes, SHA-256 58f98241e57b04d425a3d51929f65cee32a3bfab86a7934c84f1812abc1bc54b. This is the complete high-resolution JPEG, matching the advertised media dimensions. The full photograph’s dimensions do not describe the resolution of the smaller pasted illustration.

Illustration crop (765, 1695)–(3005, 3125). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.691256 degrees counterclockwise, measured from the long printed picture-frame bottom rule. Final trim (32, 32)–(2208, 1398); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete relevant composition, inner printed frame, title and text where present, signatures 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.