Adelaide Hanscom’s Rubáiyát

hanscom01.jpg

(Apologies again for the downtime, the fourth outage this month.)

Thanks are due to Beautiful Century for drawing my attention to this 1905 edition of the Rubáiyát illustrated by Adelaide Hanscom (later Adelaide Hanscom Leeson). Hanscom (1875–1931) was an American artist and photographer whose work here is notable for the early use of photographs to illustrate a popular book, and for many of those photographs being nude portraits of her literary friends. No doubt the “exotic” theme enabled these to escape opprobrium at a time when male nudity (in photographs at least) was a very scarce commodity. The book was understandably popular, and a later edition featured tinted plates, an example of which can be seen below. A few of the plates look too much like what they were—friends of the artist posing in costumes—but the majority achieve that nebulous atmosphere, common to much photography of the time, that sought to imitate the effects of painting. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

hanscom02.jpg

hanscom03.jpg

hanscom04.jpg

hanscom05.jpg

hanscom06.jpg

hanscom07.jpg

hanscom08.jpg

hanscom09.jpg

hanscom10.jpg

hanscom11.jpg

hanscom12.jpg

hanscom13.jpg

hanscom14.jpg

hanscom18.jpg

Tinted photo from the 1914 edition.

hanscom15.jpg

hanscom16.jpg

hanscom17.jpg

Previously on { feuilleton }
René Bull’s Rubáiyát
Ronald Balfour’s Rubáiyát

Discover more from { feuilleton }

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading