(Jobbins, J.R.) (lithographic artist)
Examples of modern architecture, ecclesiastical and domestic. Sixty-four views of churches & chapels, schools, colleges, mansions, town halls, railway stations, etc. (many with plans attached). Erected from the designs of G.G.Scott, R.A.; G.E.Street; J.P.Seddon; E.G.Paley; R.J.Withers; J.K.Colling; E.L.Blackburne; G.F.Bodley; E.B.Lamb; J.Johnson; E. I’Anson; and other eminent architects. First American from the latest English edition.
Boston, James R.Osgood and Company 1873.
Full Description
Folio. Printed title leaf (in red and black), leaf with list of plates, (64) litho plates (some double-page). Publisher’s gilt and blind-stamped cloth, rather worn and faded, neatly rebacked using original spine. Text leaves spotted, a little intermittent spotting elsewhere.
This book’s American imprint, stemming from the fact that it is a reissue of the sheets of an earlier British edition, disguises the fact that it offers a striking display of often unfamiliar designs by well-known (and some lesser-known) English architects of the mid 1860s for ecclesiastical and domestic buildings, all redrawn for publication by the experienced architectural draughtsman John Richard Jobbins. The first thirty-eight plates are devoted to church architecture, including R.J.Withers’s notable design for the Anglican Church of the Resurrection in Brussels (shown on four double-page plates), while the rest of the plates illustrate designs for railway stations, schools and colleges, a number of substantial private houses, Bromley Town Hall, the New Masonic Hall at Manchester, model dwellings for artisans in Halifax, the Royal Dock Hotel in Grimsby, and even Brill’s Baths in Brighton, a Gothic-style extravaganza designed by (very unexpectedly for a baths building) George Gilbert Scott. An incidental feature of interest is that the original English edition, very rare and almost unfindable, carried an 1870 date on its title leaf and the imprint of Bradley Thomas Batsford, the founder of the Batsford firm of architectural publishers and booksellers, and thus predates J.K.Colling’s 1874 book on English Medieval Foliage, considered by the Batsford firm in the 1940s to have been the first book to carry a Batsford imprint (Bolitho, A Batsford Century, 1943, p.16). The present American edition, which is in our experience almost as unfindable as the English edition of 1870, thus offers any collector of the Batsford firm’s publications a very acceptable substitute.