L'Amerique.
Title
L' Amerique
Description
Allegorical print depicting the Americas as a Black woman and boy. The woman dressed in a bejeweled feather head piece, pearls, and shawl has a black parrot perched on her hand and overlooks the shoulder of a reclining boy. The boy, draped in a blue cloth and holding a bow, his cache of arrows beneath him, wears a feather armband and gold collar. He returns the glance of the woman. A palm tree stands behind them., Title from item., Date inferred from content., RVCDC, Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Purchase 1971., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of the Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014., Haid was a Bavarian engraver, portraitist, and book illustrator.
Creator
Haid, Johann Jacob, 1704-1767, artist
Date
[ca. 1755]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department *GC-Allegories [7993.F.3]
Columbia trading with all the world.
Title
Columbia trading with all the world
Description
Allegorical print depicting "Columbia" (i.e., the United States) as a white woman with brown hair, on the deck of a ship. She holds a caduceus and disperses treasures from a horn of plenty held by "Wisdom," who is portrayed as a white woman attired in a helmet, armor, a skirt, and sandals. Wisdom holds a spear in her left hand and gives the treasures to three male figures representing the country's international trade partners. Figures depicted are: Africa as a Black man attired in a headpiece shaped like an elephant's head and leaning on a tusk of ivory; Asia as a bearded man with a light-brown color skin tone attired in a turban; and South America as a man in a feathered headpiece carrying a bow., Title from item., Date inferred from content., Possibly published in London and not the United States., Revised state. Previous title and imprint faintly visible and illegible below image., Gift of Dr. Mary DeWitt Pettit, 1965., RVCDC, Description revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of the Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014.
Date
[ca. 1789-ca. 1800]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department *GC - Allegories [7737.F]
Primrose
Title
Primrose The celebrated piebald boy, a native of the West Indies; publicly [sic] shewn in London 1789
Description
Full-length portrait of John Richardson Primrose Bobey, a young Black man with the pigmentation disorder vitiligo, born enslaved in Jamaica, and inspected and exhibited as a specimen of science throughout England. Shows the young man standing on a shoreline. He stands with palm trees in the distance. He is dressed in a loincloth knotted on his left hip and adorned with tassels. White patches are visible on his legs, torso, and down the center of his head. In his right hand, he holds up a captioned portrait broadside of himself as a boy and points to it with his left hand bent at the elbow and from in front of his waist. The broadside depicts the very young Bobey with primarily white skin above text reading "A Child born at Gros Islet, in the Island of St. Lucia, of Black Parents, Taken from a model of the infant colored from nature," and at the museum of T. Pole, Surgeon, Grace Church, in London." In adulthood in London, Bobey advocated for his freedom from enslavement and was a proprietor of a menagerie and a member of several societies, including the Free Masons., Title from item., Manuscript note on recto: Presented T. Pole Surgeon, London, to the Library of Philadelphia., Publication information inferred from broadside illustrated in image and address of London publishers Wm. Darton & Jos. Harvey., Noted in LCP Minutes, v. 3, p. 230-231., Biographies of sitter in Karl Pearson, A monograph on Albinism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1911-1913) and William Granger, The new wonderful museum, and extraordinary magazine: ... (London: Printed for R.S. Kirby, 1804), v. 2, p. 711-714., Pole, a Philadelphia-born Quaker physician, was also an artist who illustrated his own text "An Anatomical Instructor, an Illustration of the Modern and Most Approved Methods of Preparing and Preserving the Different Parts of the Human Body, and of Quadrupeds, by Injection, Corrosion, ... (London, 1790)., Part of digital collections catalog through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of the Commonwealth Libraries, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, Governor, 2013-2014., Descripton revised 2021., Access points revised 2021., Gift of Thomas Pole, 1790., RVCDC
Date
[ca. 1789]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | PRINT. *portrait prints - Primrose [901.F.27]