File:SB-01-063-source-1.jpg

Summary

Description

Cropped and straightened reproduction of the engraving captioned “An Orissa Brahmin.” A standing man holds a cord with his raised hands beside water and vegetation. An earlier publication's accompanying text describes him as offering devotion to the sun. The artist and engraver have not been identified; the small mark near the lower right is not reliably legible.

The composition matches H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 1, page 63, item 2. This file is a later book reproduction, not an established source of the album clipping.

Source

Thomas Powell, Illustrated Home Book of the World's Great Nations: Being a Geographical, Historical and Pictorial Encyclopedia (Chicago: Werner, 1893), printed p. 94.

• Internet Archive volume record and full digitized book.
• Internet Archive identifier: illustratedhomeb00powerich; library contributor: University of California Libraries; call number: nrlf_ucb:GLAD-50750644; digitization sponsor recorded by Internet Archive: MSN.
• The full page contains several illustrations; this crop includes only the Brahmin and the original printed caption.

Thanks to the University of California Libraries and Internet Archive for making this digitized volume freely available.

File and processing

JPEG, 705 × 856 pixels. Prepared from the existing 2450 × 3242 full-page JPEG of printed p. 94. The input was retained unchanged. Crop bounds before alignment: left 1625, top 258, right 2330, bottom 1114 pixels. A small 0.425-degree counterclockwise alignment was estimated from the printed caption and applied with the crop using a single bicubic inverse-affine resampling.

The whole engraved composition, original printed caption, and a small paper margin are retained. Other illustrations, article text, the column divider and running header are outside this crop. No enlargement, colour or tonal adjustment, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. The natural paper colour and printed lines are preserved. The linked full digitized book retains the page context. Source-page SHA-256: 0d63ee4eee9f5cd0f0fb075f4e4517ca33a3424323e9373a21d0c6f19fba4dd3.

Earlier publication and limits

The same composition appears in The Church Missionary Gleaner, New Series, volume IV (1854), November, printed p. 127. Its accompanying text describes a Brahmin offering devotion to the sun. Digitized 1854 volume, via Wikimedia Commons. This is an earlier located publication, not a proven first publication or proven source of the album clipping. The 1854 page is a separate monochrome witness; its publication details do not describe the 1893 scan reproduced in this file.

The date 1893 belongs to the present book edition, not to the album clipping or first creation of the engraving. Internet Archive's note about an anonymous 1873 edition, All Round the World, does not establish the image's presence there without inspecting that edition. The artist, engraver, first publication and exact source used for the album clipping remain unidentified.

Rights statement

The digitized 1893 book is identified on Wikimedia Commons as public domain in the United States under its PD US expired statement. The Internet Archive record reports a visible copyright notice dated 1893 and does not supply a separate Creative Commons licence for this crop. Only the non-generative geometric processing listed above was applied.