Untitled [Bombay Illustrated: A Set of Eight Engravings and a Volume of The Illustrated London News, July–December 1875]
a) The Illustrated London News
Visit of the Viceroy of India to the Sasson Dock at Bombay
London, 25 December 1875 (as printed)
Wood-engraving on newsprint, after a sketch by the ILN “Special Artist”
16 x 11 in (41 × 28 cm)
Captioned lower image; text and portrait blocks above.
A fine, complete page from The Illustrated London News showing the Viceroy’s ceremonial visit to a Bombay dock—identified in the printed caption as “Sasson Dock”—with steamers berthed alongside and a mixed gathering of officials, soldiers and citizens lining the pier. The lower half-page harbour scene (from a sketch “by our special artist”) is supported by the typical ILN layout of portrait vignettes and obituary text above. The date at the head of the page reads 25 December 1876, within the first year of Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty (1876–80).
Founded in 1842, The Illustrated London News was the leading illustrated weekly of the Victorian era, sending “special artists” to report visually on events across the Empire; their pencil sketches were studio-engraved on wood for rapid publication and wide circulation. The Bombay subject here reflects a period of intense harbour development following the creation of the Bombay Port Trust in 1873 and just after the opening of Sassoon Dock (1875)—the city’s first wet dock—leading toward larger undertakings such as Prince’s Dock (opened 1880).
This engraving, showing the Viceroy received on the pier with smoke rising from steamships and warehouses beyond, visually records Bombay’s shift into a modern steam-age port. Its blend of ceremonial pageantry and industrial setting is characteristic of ILN reportage on India in the later 19th century, when the paper regularly covered state visits, dock works and civic improvements.
b) The Graphic – John Charlton
Caught Napping, an Unconditional Surrender: An Incident in the Bombay Military Manoeuvres
The Graphic, London, 15 August 1892 (issue dated at head of page)
Later hand-coloured chromolithograph on paper after a drawing by John Charlton; signed with initials in the block
16 × 11 in (41 × 28 cm)
A vivid colour plate from The Graphic showing two Indian cavalry sowars—lancers with fluttering pennons—surprising a red-coated opponent during field exercises near Bombay. The head-on, close-quarters viewpoint and taut horseflesh are hallmarks of John Charlton, the pre-eminent late-Victorian painter-illustrator of mounted action. The plate appears in the weekly for 15 August 1891, with the printed caption “Caught Napping, an Unconditional Surrender—An Incident in the Bombay Military Manoeuvres.”
Founded in 1869 as a high-quality rival to the Illustrated London News, The Graphic commissioned leading artists to report on imperial life and spectacle; its circulation and influence stretched across Britain and the Empire. By the 1890s the paper occasionally issued colour supplements—often chromolithographs—to showcase equestrian, military and ceremonial themes; Indian Army subjects were a popular strand. Charlton contributed regularly, bringing an accurate eye for uniforms and horses to scenes of manoeuvres and campaigns.
Works like the present plate register the culture of late-Victorian garrison sport and drill—the “gymkhana” and field exercise—through which Bombay’s mounted units displayed horsemanship, discipline and esprit de corps. As pictorial reportage, the sheet sits at the intersection of journalism and art, encapsulating how metropolitan readers pictured India’s soldiery in the decades before 1900.
c) The Illustrated London News
The Royal Visit to India: Preparations for Illuminating Bombay — “Supporters of the Crown”
London, 4 December 1875 (Vol. LXVII, No. 1895)
Later hand-coloured wood engraving on newspaper sheet; captioned “Facsimile of a sketch by our Special Artist.”
16 × 11 in (41 × 28 cm)
A complete front page from the Illustrated London News recording preparations in Bombay for the reception of the Prince of Wales in November 1875: craftsmen hoist a crown-shaped illumination frame while lamps are passed up for fixing, the scene bustling with scaffolding, barrels and painted devices. The issue and caption are confirmed in the ILN for 4 December 1875 (“PREPARATIONS FOR ILLUMINATING BOMBAY: SUPPORTERS OF THE CROWN. THE ROYAL VISIT TO INDIA”), printed as a facsimile from the paper’s “Special Artist”.
The 1875–76 royal tour sent a stream of imperial images back to Britain through the illustrated press. The ILN deployed specialist artists (notably William Simpson) to sketch events on the spot for rapid studio engraving; The Graphic did likewise, ensuring weekly pictorial coverage across the Empire’s readership. Bombay’s welcome was famed for its spectacular street decorations and “vistas…of variegated lights”, as contemporary accounts note—context that explains this page’s focus on illumination makers at work.
d) The Graphic
The Long, Long Indian Day — Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Subaltern
London, 1882
Later hand-colour-printed wood-engraving (chromoxylograph) on wove newsprint; full-page composite with nine vignette scenes;
Sheet 11 x 15.75 in (28 x 40 cm)
A lively colour plate from The Graphic charting a junior British officer’s day in India from dawn to night—mosquito nets and “no sleep”, parade and duty, tiffin, bandstand, evening carriage drives and mess. The design arranges nine captioned vignettes in a cinematic sequence, typical of the paper’s narrative pictorial journalism. The subject is recorded as a Graphic illustration of 1882.
Founded in 1869, The Graphic rivalled the Illustrated London News by commissioning leading artists and investing in superior engraving and colour printing. Its composite “day-in-the-life” plates distilled the routines of imperial society for a metropolitan readership, balancing observation with gentle satire. The present sheet focuses on the subaltern—the most junior commissioned officer—whose experience in India was defined by climate (punkahs, mosquito nets), punctilious drill, cantonment social life (bandstand, club, mess) and perpetual movement. by horse or tonga. In the 1870s–80s the paper increasingly issued colour supplements (often chromoxylographs/chromolithographs), enhancing the theatrical immediacy of scenes such as this and shaping how late-Victorian audiences pictured everyday life “on the station”.
e) The illustrated London News
The Persian War: The Charge of the 3rd Bombay Cavalry, at the Battle of Kooshab
London, 25 April 1857
Wood engraving on newspaper sheet
Sheet 11 x 15.75 in (28 x 40 cm)
A powerful Victorian news print showing the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry breaking into a Persian infantry square during the Battle of Kooshab (Khush-Ab), 8 February 1857, the decisive engagement of the Anglo-Persian War. The plate appeared in the Illustrated London News on 25 April 1857 and is among the best-known images of the action.
Kooshab—fought near Bushire on the Persian Gulf—saw the Bombay Presidency field force defeat a larger Persian army. The 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry (later “Poona Horse”) executed the famous charge that burst a formed square of the Shah’s Guards; two of its officers, Lieutenants Arthur Thomas Moore and John Grant Malcolmson, received the Victoria Cross for conspicuous gallantry during the attack. The episode became emblematic of the Presidency Army’s élan and is commemorated in regimental histories and museum collections.
f) Henry William Brewery
The Royal Visit to India – The Prince of Wales Dining in the Caves of Elephanta, Bombay
11 Dec. 1875
Later hand-coloured woodcut engraving on paper
Print size: 13.25 x 20.5 in (33.5 x 51.8 cm)
Sheet size: 13.75 x 22 in (34.8 x 55.7 cm)
Published in The Graphic. A celebrated Victorian newsprint of the Elephanta banquet staged for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) during his 1875–76 tour. Beneath festooned lights and amid the rock-cut columns of the Great Cave (Cave 1), the Prince and Bombay grandees dine while long lines of servants attend. First issued in The Graphic in December 1875 (contemporary sources cite 11 December), impressions are frequently found with later hand colour.
The 1875–76 royal progress generated an unprecedented stream of pictorial reportage. The Graphic—founded in 1869 to rival the Illustrated London News—sent “special artists” whose field sketches were cut on wood for rapid weekly publication. At Elephanta, the transformation of a sanctified Saiva rock-cut temple into a banqueting hall became one of the tour’s most reproduced images; it epitomised the late-Victorian fusion of imperial pageantry, archaeology and spectacle that shaped metropolitan visions of India. Recent scholarship and image libraries record this plate as The Graphic, 11 December 1875; the ILN issued a closely related view the same week titled “Lunching in the Caves of Elephanta.”
g) The Illustrated London News
A Panoramic Prospect of Bombay from Malabar Hill (with key)
London, 1853
Wood-engraving on paper; the image with a printed numerical key along the upper margin
10.24 x 15.35 in (26 × 39 cm)
A finely engraved early panorama of Bombay taken from the height of Malabar Hill, sweeping across Back Bay to the Fort and harbour. Published in The Illustrated London News in 1853, the view belongs to the moment India’s first passenger railway (Bombay–Thane) inaugurated a new age of mobility and growth; the shoreline still reads as a largely open crescent, poised on the brink of rapid urban change.
Panoramas from Malabar Hill were prized by European readers for their mix of topographical accuracy and picturesque composition. This 1853 plate is an important marker in Bombay’s visual record, bridging the late Company period and the coming decades of city-making that followed rail and harbour expansion. As a news image, it sits within a broader nineteenth-century corpus of Bombay prospects—from earlier multi-sheet and newspaper panoramas to later romantic steel engravings—through which the island city was introduced to metropolitan audiences.
h) The Illustrated London News
The Shah’s Visit to the West India Dock
London, June 1873 (published during Naser al-Din Shah Qajar’s London tour; very likely the late-June issue)
Large wood-engraving on newsprint (double-page centre illustration); titled beneath the image
16 × 22 in (41 × 56 cm) (as issued, with central fold)
A sweeping dockside panorama recording Naser al-Din Shah Qajar’s state visit to London: beneath an awninged gallery the Shah views the crowded basins of the West India Docks, with shipping dressed overall and spectators massed along the quays. The scene formed part of the paper’s extensive coverage of the Shah’s 1873 tour and corresponds to events of 25 June 1873, when the royal party travelled by river to the docks before continuing to Greenwich; contemporary descriptions emphasise the dense river traffic and a dramatic salute by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s steam engines.
The visit of Naser al-Din Shah—the first by a reigning Persian monarch to Britain—was a major news phenomenon. The Illustrated London News mobilised its engravers and “special artists” to turn on-the-spot sketches into large plates for rapid weekly publication, shaping how metropolitan readers pictured the tour. The West India Docks (Isle of Dogs; opened 1802) were showcased as a symbol of imperial commerce; a commemorative lithograph published in London specifically memorialised the Shah’s appearance there on 25 June 1873, confirming the date and the prominence given to the event. Accounts of the day note that fire floats under Captain Eyre Massey Shaw lined the river entrance and, on cue, sent “several hundred jets of water” in salute—exactly the sort of spectacle Victorian illustrated papers delighted in recording.
i) The Illustrated London News
Volume LXVII: July–December 1875 (including the special supplement of Visit of the Prince of Wales to India)
London: George C. Leighton, 198 Strand, 1875
640 pages including the large wood-engraved title-page (allegorical frontispiece) from the bound half-yearly volume
16.14 x 11.02 in (41 × 28 cm)
An ornate, allegorical title-page from Vol. LXVII (July–December 1875) of The Illustrated London News, the six-month volume that carries the paper’s most sustained pictorial record of Bombay during the Prince of Wales’s tour of India (1875–76)—including such plates as “Preparations for Illuminating Bombay” (4 December 1875) and “The Prince of Wales lunching/dining in the Caves of Elephanta” (11 December 1875). Printed and published by George C. Leighton at 198 Strand, this is the signature leaf that introduced a volume now valued for its concentration of Bombay material.
Founded in 1842, the ILN pioneered weekly visual news. For the 1875–76 royal progress it dispatched “special artists” (notably William Simpson) whose field sketches were rapidly engraved for London readers; The Graphic did the same, producing a constant stream of images from Bombay—arrivals, street illuminations, the Elephanta banquet, processions to Government House, Parell, and more. Because the Prince landed first at Bombay and the city staged the most elaborate welcomes, Vol. LXVII preserves an unusually dense sequence of Bombay views within a single half-year. As such, the present title page serves as the decorated portal to one of the key visual archives of the city in the 1870s.
BOMBAY IN PRINT: THE CITY AS SEEN IN THE ILLUSTRATED PRESS, 1853–1895
From mid-century panoramas to late-Victorian colour supplements, this group charts how Bombay entered the global imagination through the great illustrated weeklies. The Illustrated London News (founded 1842) and The Graphic (founded 1869) pioneered mass visual journalism, dispatching “special artists” such as William Simpson and John Charlton to sketch events on the spot; their drawings were cut on wood and printed in vast runs, and, by the 1880s, occasionally issued with colour. What began as topical news has become an irreplaceable historical record of a city in motion.
The earliest sheets capture the geography and nerve-centre of the island: a sweeping 1853 Malabar Hill panorama and, in 1857, the Bombay Presidency’s reach in the charge at Kooshab during the Anglo-Persian War. By the 1870s the press followed Bombay’s transformation into a modern port—docks, telegraph, and spectacle—culminating in the Prince of Wales’s visit (1875–76). The famous Elephanta banquet, the city’s elaborate street illuminations, and the farewell aboard HMS Serapis furnished metropolitan readers with theatrical images that fixed Bombay’s profile between archaeology, ceremony and commerce. Complementary London views—such as the Shah of Persia at the West India Docks (1873)—situate Bombay within the wider imperial maritime network that fed and was fed by the city.
Closing decades turn inward to daily life and soldiery: a witty composite of “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Subaltern” and Charlton’s kinetic plates of Bombay manoeuvres and gymkhana sport show the cadences of cantonment existence—horse, mess and parade—rendered with journalistic immediacy and an artist’s eye for movement.
As a suite, these plates trace Bombay’s passage from picturesque crescent to modern, infrastructural metropolis and reveal the illustrated periodical as the nineteenth century’s most potent image-maker. They are prized not only for their artistry—tight line, confident perspective, and, in the Graphic plates, vivid hand-colour—but also for their documentary precision: topography, uniforms, shipping, ritual and crowd. Together they form a compact visual archive—at once celebratory and incisive—in which adjacent sheets “speak” across decades, mapping the city’s energy, its harbour, its people and its place in the world.
(Set of eleven)
This work will be shipped unframed
NON-EXPORTABLE
This lot is offered at RESERVE
This lot will be shipped in "as is" condition. For further details, please refer to the images of individual lots as reference for the condition of each lot.