File:SB-10-128-source-1.jpg

Summary

Description

The Religious Vanity Fair, by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler (1838–1894), signed J. Keppler. Matching colour illustration on the back of H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 10, page 128, supplemental album scan SB-10-128.1.jpg, image item 128.1:1. The ORIGINAL JACOB sign and three balls, figures at the religious stalls, articulated Presbyterian puppet, baptism barrel, sofa and right-hand bishop correspond in position, labels and details to the album cutting. The complete composition, printed title and artist's signature are retained.

Matching publication: Puck, volume VI, no. 137, 22 October 1879, centre spread, pp. 526–527 (one-based issue PDF pages 8–9). The issue cover supplies the date, volume and number; the volume VI index lists this cartoon under pp. 526–527. Both original magazine halves have been visually compared. This establishes a matching publication, not the precise physical copy used in the scrapbook.

The Boston Public Library catalogue gives an approximate 1880–1890 date, and its mounted sheet has an 1880s label. These approximate object-level descriptions are retained as discrepancies with the securely dated 1879 magazine appearance; they do not prove the date of this particular physical impression. No date label, stamp or annotation has been removed.

Source

Boston Public Library, Print Department, Americana Collection, local accession 11_03_000162. Digitized colour lithograph provided through the library's official Flickr account, photo 19314061178.

• Library image and catalogue description.
• Original colour JPEG.
• Matching Puck issue; issue PDF, pages 8–9.

Thank you to Boston Public Library for preserving this print and freely providing the colour original.

File and processing

Original RGB JPEG, 2000 × 1371 pixels, 3,642,052 bytes. This supplied image is already trimmed to the complete mounted sheet and its print rules are horizontal; the original bytes are retained unchanged. The full frame, title, credit, central fold, library stamp, handwritten annotations, catalogue labels and paper edges are preserved. No additional crop, rotation, resizing, JPEG recompression, tonal adjustment, colourization, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction. Source SHA-256 0828d601d6e2fafa7be1463c31906bb9991acbd5354fdbcf7a9d2bdcbaba305c. This is a clearer colour witness, not a claim of higher pixel dimensions than the album photograph.

Rights

The library's current Flickr photo links to Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, verified 4 November 2026. Attribution: Boston Public Library; artist Joseph Ferdinand Keppler. The library's catalogue description separately states No known copyright restrictions; that statement is not substituted for the displayed CC BY 2.0 licence. Changes: none to the supplied original image; descriptive filename only.