File:SB-05-066-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Grasshopper and the Ant. A sequence of anthropomorphic insects surrounds the complete printed fable: the grasshopper approaches an ant at a desk, an ant reads a paper at upper right, and other insect figures run down the left edge and across the bottom. The figures, desk, hats, paper, musical instrument, title, complete fable, moral, frame and hatching match the complete scrapbook illustration on V66. Separate cut fragments of the same composition appear at the top and near the centre of the collage on V65; the full external source is shown without reconstructing that 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.25. The book title is dated 1878 and its copyright notice 1877. The catalogue status is Research in Progress; that date does not establish the first publication. The engraver is not securely identified here.

Compared directly with H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 5, page 66, item 3, and the separate fragments in volume 5, page 65, collage item 1. The scrapbook image, collage arrangement, handwriting, notes and transcription remain separate witnesses and are not altered. This matching composition does not identify the physical copy used for the scrapbook cuttings.

Source

Natural-colour photograph supplied by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, accession 1938-57-1070-202, exact media CHSDM-57290_01-000001. Credit line: Bequest of Erskine Hewitt. Medium in the official record: Printed in black ink on paper. The photograph shows a printed cutting mounted in an album, not a preparatory drawing. This exact media view is used; the object title alone is not evidence for the contents of its other media views.

• 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.25.

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, 1310 × 2155 pixels, RGB. Complete original museum JPEG: 4538 × 5405 pixels, 13501799 bytes, SHA-256 bd9f3cd2b06a82f8d1910aed80e96b3f70450449f9253e2c9dbf3f7b64d05ea4. 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 (1260, 1330)–(2610, 3525). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.082702 degrees counterclockwise, measured from the long printed bottom picture-frame rule. Final trim (20, 20)–(1330, 2175); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete inner printed frame, all figures, title, fable and moral are retained; the outer mounting-paper outline is excluded. Original paper colour, marks, 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.