Oriental Album Characters, costumes and modes of life in the valley of the Nile.

London, Madden, 1848. . First edition, deluxe issue; folio (57.5 x 44.2 cm), chromolithographic additional title, hand-coloured tinted lithographic frontispiece and 30 hand-coloured plates all mounted on card, by Lemoine, Lehnert, Mouilleron, Le Roux and others after Prisse d'Avennes, printed by Lemercier, small chip to blank corner of frontispiece, occasional light spotting to plate surrounds, plate of 'Female Fellah' at page 26 with minor soiling to image, small marginal nicks to a few text leaves and tissue guards, contemporary red half morocco gilt, neatly rebacked preserving most of original spine, covers a little worn, a very good copy. A deluxe copy of the first edition with the plates fully coloured and mounted on card. Probably no more than 100 copies printed with few surviving intact. Who was Who in Egyptology (London, 1972) describes Prisse as the 'most mysterious of all the great pioneer figures in Egyptology', and this early album, published in the same decade that he undertook excavations at Thebes and discovered the Table of the Kings at Karnak, justifies his reputation as 'a fine artist and outstandingly brilliant observer,' equally interested in the costumes of men and women. The Anglo-Indian in Arab dress seen in the frontispiece is the botanist George Lloyd (1815-1843), and the artist's posthumous dedication records that the young man had suggested 'this series of drawings, illustrative of the valley of the Nile', before his untimely death in a shooting accident. Atabey 1001; Blackmer 1357; Brunet IV, 885; Colas 2427; Lipperheide Ma30; not in Abbey.