Valentine card: P.14410-R-25

Titles

Valentine card

Maker(s)

Publisher: Dobbs, Henry

Entities

• Valentine card

Categories

• Print
• Album

Description

Etching and hand-colouring on embossed paper with blue painted edge. A woman wearing regency dress stands within an etched arched frame with pink curtain above and heart pierced with an arrow. A circular temple in the background to the left. A hand-written verse above and below the central image: "When first we met I gazed and found / I had received a lasting wound / Which only you can cure; ...". DOBBS PATENT embossed at lower centre. Hand-written graphite inscription at upper left: "rare / 1811". Watermark: EDMEADS Co / 1811. The same embossing die is seen on other DOBBS PATENT cards, one as late as circa 1836. See P.14410-R-8. The same embossing die as seen in other DOBBS PATENT cards. See for example P.14410-R-14. A clipping from a sale catalogue is affixed to the album leaf: "748 - Earliest Dated Valentines.- A VERY RARE EXAMPLE, 4to, ... with etched female figure ... / £2 2s ...". The clipping is from a catalogue dated 1924 (No. 35) for the bookseller R.S. Frampton who was based at "Walton House", 37 Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, London, N4. See P.14529-R. Four of Frampton's catalogues dating from the mid 1920s were found in boxes containing Glaisher's valentines. This card was included in the exhibition of valentine cards, _For ever thine: the nineteenth century valentine_, held in the Charrington Print Room at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1995, no. 2. A graphite number "2" is written onto the album leaf in the lower right-hand corner, which corresponds to the numbering of the catalogue.

Legal notes

Bequeathed by Dr J. W. L. Glaisher, 1928