Beschreibung:

Belnos (Mrs S[ophia] C[harlotte]). The Sundhya or the Daily Prayers of the Brahmins. Illustrated in a Series of Original Drawings from Nature, demonstrating their Attitudes and Different Signs and Figures performed by them during the Ceremonies of their Morning Devotions, and likewise their Poojas. Together with a Descriptive Text annexed to each Plate, and the Prayers from the Sanscrit, translated into English, 1st edition, [London: Day & Son], 1851, hand-coloured lithographic vignette title-page, 24 hand-coloured lithographic plates, preface leaf and 21 leaves of descriptive text, title-page heavily spotted and with damp-stain to top margin (damp-stain continuing onto preface leaf), plate 1 soiled, trimmed and mounted, plates 13, 14 and 21 spotted, plate 21 heavily spotted, torn, reassembled and backed on linen, variable spotting and finger-soiling to other plates (light to moderate and largely restricted to margins), marginal repairs to versos of title-page, preface, text-leaves of plates 1, 2 and 22, modern half cloth, large folio (60.8 x 43.2 cm) (Qty: 1) Provenance: 1) From the library of the Schlagintweit brothers, 19th-century German explorers of India and Central Asia (blind stamp 'Ex bibliotheca Schlagintweit' to foot of title-page) 2) Konrad, prince of Bavaria (1883-1963; bookplate to front pastedown, ink-stamp to rear free endpaper). Abbey Travel 477; Lipperheide (1965) Ld 37; not in Colas or Tooley. Rare. 'Relatively little is known about Mrs. Belnos. Her husband, Jean-Jacques Belnos, was a French miniaturist and lithographer, who had travelled to India in 1807, and established a practice in Calcutta as a painter of miniatures and portraits of the British, a business which his widow seems to have continued following his death' (De Silva, Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c.1785-1845, pp. 106-7). Abbey speculates that Mrs Belnos was Indian, but she was in fact almost certainly the daughter of William Moore assistant surgeon in the Bengal army. This seems to be her second and last published work, following Twenty four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal, which appeared in 1832.