SMYTH, Coke
Sketches in the Canadas.
The Stevens-Siebert copy, of the de-luxe issue, the only known example to have appeared in commerce
Publication details:
London, Thomas McLean, c1842.
Information:
First edition, deluxe issue. Portfolio (560 by 450mm) 23 tinted lithographed plates (380 by 273mm) handcoloured and mounted on heavy card (555 by 445mm), each ruled in yellow ink, loose in portfolio, without dedication leaf, as issued; publisher’s maroon moire cloth portfolio, morocco spine and flaps, cloth ties, morocco label on upper cover.
Literature:
Abbey, 625; Lande, 2215; Sabin, 85203; Staton and Tremaine, 2549; Tooley, 460.
Provenance:
1. With Henry Stevens, 1945;
2. Sold to Frank Thomas Siebert, Jr. (1912-1998), his sale, ‘The Frank T. Siebert Library of the North American Indian and the American Frontier’, Sotheby’s New York, May 21, 1999, lot 25. Siebert was renowned as a discerning collector of material related to North American Indians, and the American Frontier. He compiled a dictionary of the Penobscot language in 1984, which contained a vocabulary of nearly 15,000 words. He also published research which expanded scholarly knowledge of the Algonquian language.
Notes:
First edition, deluxe issue. According to Abbey, the ‘Publisher’s Circular’ advertised two issues of the work, one uncoloured at £6. 6s., the other coloured and mounted at £8.8s, and without the dedication leaf to the Earl of Durham, the Governor-General of Canada. The portfolio version, as here, has not otherwise appeared at auction since 1966 [this example]. Smyth recorded his impressions of Canada while employed as drawing master to the daughters of the Earl of Durham during his mission to Canada in 1838. The plates include genre scenes of Indians, views of Niagara, and depictions of buffalo hunts.
Born in 1808, John Richard Coke Smyth was the “only son of Richard Smyth and Elizabeth Coke (cl777-1851). More commonly known as Coke Smyth, with which name he signed his works, he has been mistakenly named Frederick Coke Smyth or Smith in some reference books. Smyth married Marion Hockett in about 1832 at Cripplegate Church. They had six children.
“Smyth’s passport, still in the family’s possession, would suggest that he was a gentleman of means who travelled widely on the Continent, as did his contemporary, William Henry Bartlett. In 1835-6, Smyth visited Constantinople, apparently as an unpaid attache. His on-the-spot sketches were published in Illustrations of Constantinople made in the Years 1835-6 (London, 1837), which comprised 26 lithographic views arranged and drawn on stone by John Frederick Lewis (1805-76).
“Subsequently he was engaged as drawing master to the household of John George Lambton (1792-1840), 1st Earl of Durham. It was in this capacity in April 1838 that Smyth accompanied Durham, newly appointed Governor to the Canadas, and his party on board HMS Hastings to Quebec. During Durham’s brief tenure of office, which terminated with his resignation that October, he travelled extensively in Lower and Upper Canada. Thus, there was ample opportunity for Smyth and his pupils. Lady Mary Louisa Lambton (later Lady Elgin, 1819-98) and Katherine Jane Ellice (died 1864), to sketch firsthand the Canadian scene at the time of the Mackenzie-Papineau Rebellions. Several of these drawings provided the basis for the 23 lithographic views dedicated to the Earl of Durham in Sketches in the Canadas (London, c1840) by Coke Smyth” (Cooke for the ‘Coverdale Collection of Canadiana’).
