VIEWS OF JAVA, early 1860s Oblong folio, bound... Lot 2

VIEWS OF JAVA, early 1860s Oblong folio, bound in plum basane, titled in gold letters: "JAVA - Eduard Cassalette" (Javanese binding), with 53 early albumen prints, numbered in pencil, mounted on the rectos only, numerous wetnesses, prints 25, 26 and 27 are missing, but two unmounted albumen prints, an ancient temple and an additional view of Raden Saleh's mansion are inserted at the end of the volume, the last photograph, a reproduction by Isidore van Kinsbergen of Raden Saleh's lost painting inspired by the Raft of the Medusa, is numbered 53 in ink. Humidity has affected all of the prints, half of them quite severely. The prints are from the very early days of photography in Java, by the still mysterious first European photographer of Java, Isidore van Kinsbergen, and his famous young English competitors, the founders of the Woodbury & Page studio who arrived in Batavia from Australia on 18 May 1857 and left in 1863 and 1865 respectively, leaving the studio to the younger brother Henry Woodbury, who arrived in 1859. In 1863 W&P offered for sale a series of sixteen albumen prints, the first of their kind in Java, several of which are included here. The composition as well as the sequencing allow a comparison of the first part (Batavia) with the album of pharmacist W. Specht Grijp, in the collections of the Rijskmuseum in Amsterdam. Specht Grijp returned to the Netherlands from Batavia in 1865 and his album consists of 25 sheets with a print pasted on each side, making a total of 49 albumin prints. The Cassalette albums are among the photographic incunabula of Indonesia.