Album de Punto de Cruz de la Familia No. 1 [Fair] [Hardcover]

Description

Richly, even boldly, colorful designs for needlepoint with backdrop of the mesh of small squares. The designs might be likened to Lego designs, except they are two dimensional. Designs are very varied, with many floral displays, vignettes to full page -- roses, lilies, bouquets, baskets, bowls, laurels, etc. -- human figurative imagery such as Jesus, many children, Mexicans as to be expected but also Japanese and Dutch boys and girls, early 19th Century gentry, baseball players and other sportsmen; animals aplenty, with the ever popular horses, dogs, parrots and other birds, not to mention camels, insects, and others; letters, and one might say calligraphically showy letters; vehicles such as cars, ships and boats, carriages, etc. etc.; and a wide miscellany of other objects. And among the most eye-catching and astonishing are the full-page views, both rural and urban, including one of a Dutch canal and bridge, and a spectacular image of Florence or a place suggestive of Florence. The imagery ranges from the deliciously kitsch-y to the sublime, and the same image can often manage to be both folk art-like and yet rather sophisticated at the same time. While the illustrations that consume the entire page, as with some of the views, a ship, a Jesus portrait, are the most arresting to us, there is a beauty to how the plates with many different objects or separate illustrations are composed so harmoniously or coherently, but the sheer number of separate elements makes it a near insuperable challenge to capture everything even in a description of this length, which we are aware is hardly cursory. What we will say about all the illustrations is that they have a geometric quality to all the designs, no matter how much they seek to be realistic painting, because of the inherent demands of the form. Dating is tricky, since the source material is sometimes dated, but probably the bulk of the plates come from a source not dated. If we trust that the plates are in a consecutive order by date, then two dated magazine covers dated 1944 and 1945 are the latest, or nearly so, items in the collection. In any case, we are comfortable with the notion that the entirety is from the mid-1940s. Also the publisher's name is not given, but these were probably supplements to the publication, ""La Familia"", and we believe the publisher went by that name as well. The binding is quarto, or 4to, 30.5 by 23 cm. After the first cover leaf, which is the title leaf of an issue of the Mexican publication bearing the title we are using, the leaves, not the pages, are numbered by ink in the upper right corner 1 to 87, after which there are two leaves used like a scrapbook, to mount miscellany relating to needlepoint. Also eight loose leaves, or 16 pages of color plates of needlepoint designs from ""La Familia"" as well. So most pertinent is the total number of needlepoint design color plates, and that number is 168 full color pattern plates, in 14 other pages with color printing,...