Singapore Album of Maps & Photographs, 1884 -1907, studio of Charles J Kleinrothe. Singapore: .
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior specialist in Rare books at Peter Harrington.
Quarto half cloth album (256 × 208 mm), skilfully restored with contemporary black combed cloth, and old marbled paper, title gilt to the spin, foliate roll gilt to the turn-ins, white moiré-textured endpapers. 50 matt silver gelatin prints (166 × 117 mm), mounted both sides of 25 linen-hinged, gilt-edged, heavy card leaves.
Occasional staining or spotting on the mounts, a few with erased captioning, but the photographs themselves largely well-preserved, some faint mottling, but retaining mid-dark tone, very good.
An extremely interesting album offering a wonderful visual record of Singapore at the turn of the century, containing an excellent range of topographical views and architectural studies in and around the city-state, together with a smaller number of portrait “types” – a rickshaw driver, a hairdresser attending to a plaited queue, fishermen, etc.
Many of the waterfront offices and landing points are shown – Collyer Quay, Raffles Quay, Finlayson Green, and South Boat Quay – together with other well-known sights such as the famous Botanical Gardens in Tanglin, South Bridge Road, the main thoroughfare of Chinatown, the location of the twin-minaretted Jamae Mosque, and European buildings such as St Andrews Church, Orchard Road Presbyterian Church, the entrance to the Cavenagh Bridge, and the Cricket Club, whose pavilion was built as shown here in 1884 before its extension in 1907, thus giving bracket dates for the album. Well composed and developed, these are clearly the work of a professional studio, but cannot be definitively identified, though they are possibly from the studio of Charles J. Kleingrothe, a German photographer working in Singapore during the late 19th century, one of the few studios using matt silver prints at this time.
