Sale 2536 | Lot 299

(RACING PIGEONS)
An album with 30 photographs documenting a host of handsome pigeons, apparently belonging to W.H. Bell.
The album includes several portraits of Bell, who was a well-known patron and pigeon racing enthusiast, on his estate and in the company of his pigeon keepers. His expansive pigeon houses or coops follow, and the album finishes with a series of formally striking images of the piegons themselves (19 photographs total), most shown singly, but also in groups, each posed delicately on a small perch. Albumen prints, the images measuring 5 5/8 x4 to 8 3/8 x11½ inches (14.3x10.2 to 21.3x29.2 cm.), mounted recto only; with 5 additional prints showing the birds laid in, these with period notations, in pencil, on verso. Oblong folio, gilt-lettered leatherette, lightly worn. 1898

[1,000/1,500]