Western Provincial an album of Paintings and Drawings of the Western Cape, by Desiree Picton-Seymour and R I B Webster,
250 Copies of this de Lux Edition have been signed by Desiree Picton-Seymour the Artist, and R.I.B Webster the Author. This is number 6.
Western Provincial an album of Paintings and Drawings of the Western Cape, by Desiree Picton-Seymour and R I B Webster,
1952, Maskew Miller, Cape Town, 36 plates , 80 pages.
Condition: Black pictorial dust jacket over black cloth. Contains coloured tipped plates and black and white illustrations. Pages are clean and bright with a firm binding. Endpapers and page edges are lightly tanned and foxed. Black leatherette boards are near fine and the gold gilt motives and lettering are still bright and unblemished. The unclipped dust jacket has moderate edge wear, tears and chips to edges and spine ends. The book presents beautiful under a Cellophane cover.
This book was a collaborative effort by the artist (Picton-Seymour) and the author (Webster). The charm of this slender volume is that it captures in tipped in plates and scraper board drawings some of the architecture of the Western Cape. It is an artistic and romantic gem. If the 60 year rule applied to books as it does to buildings this title belongs in a "clearly should be preserved" heritage category. After all these decades I particularly like the composite drawings of the church spires of Cape Town and there are others of mosques and gables. People don't feature; facades and objects catch the artist's eye. The problem with this type of book of attractive plates is that the plates have a decorative appeal and so could be stripped to retrieve and frame these. Fewer copies of the book then survive. Picton-Seymour went on to produce the much more substantial study of Victorian buildings and made her mark in architectural drawings.
