Produced towards the end of the age of colour plate, overlapping with the new age of photography, these fifty-five plates are highly accomplished and provide a stunning record of probably the greatest of all Great Exhibitions, an event that summed up all the Victorians held dear –industry, material objects and high achievement.

Julian Mackenzie takes us through his top 10 British Colour Plate Books in Travel and Topography.  Here we present images from books 10 through 6: John Papworth, Giovanni Belzoni, Sauvan, Humphrey Repton and Dickinson. Check back for our highlights 1-5, which will appear next week.

It is easy today, to share images and location across a wide range of platforms pretty much wherever you are in the world; what something looks like many thousands of miles away can instantly be seen. But how do we know what buildings and vistas were like in the era before photography?

Well, we have paintings and watercolours, but to my mind the most accessible route is through the beautiful colour plate books produced from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century. These were expensive, luxurious productions, which found their greatest market in the richest country in the world at that time, Great Britain.

I have been cataloguing these colour plate books for Shapero Rare Books for longer than I care to remember. It is such a vast field. As a result, I have had to restrict this list to view books, topography and architecture only. Even then there is so much breadth, that I am having to exclude books of such rarity that you might only see once in a lifetime - I therefore can sadly not include Clark’s Views in Scotland which would certainly have been in my top three; and also books that you normally see uncoloured, thus ruling out Roberts’ Holy Land & Egypt.

10: John Papworth’s Select Views in London, 1816

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A relatively modest book, Papworth’s seventy-six colour plates provide a superb record of contemporary London offering views of the West End and its squares.

9: Giovanni Belzoni’s Egypt & Nubia, 1820-22

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Belzoni was a larger-than-life character; variously an actor, a circus strong man, a hydraulic engineer, and a collector of antiquities. The value of this work, in particular, is that he actually excavated many of the tombs himself, presenting the reader with a view of the frescoes as they appeared when first seen in modern times – a window through which to look back over thousands of years. The large format lends these images great power.

8: Sauvan’s Picturesque Tour of the Seine, 1821

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The leading London publisher of colour plate books, Ackermann, produced several river tours – the Ganges, the Rhine and the Thames amongst them. My personal favourite is the tour of the Seine with its compelling mixture of scenes of life on the river and great city views.

7: Humphrey Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, 1794

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Repton’s two later books Observations and Fragments have arguably more appeal but I like Sketches for two reasons: It was the earliest use by him of overslips to show “before” and “after” views of his proposed landscape designs; and one of the illustrations shows the great man himself, at work surveying – a lovely personal touch.

6: Dickinson’s Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, published in 1854

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Produced towards the end of the age of colour plate, overlapping with the new age of photography, these fifty-five plates are highly accomplished and provide a stunning record of probably the greatest of all Great Exhibitions, an event that summed up all the Victorians held dear –industry, material objects and high achievement.