Oriental Album.

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. St. John, who was responsible for the letterpress, was also the author of two-volume Egypt and Mohameed Ali, or Travels in the Valley of the Nile (1834).