The Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, etc.: Half Year 1826

Good run of six monthly issues of this influential magazine, Third Series, Volume I, January to June 1826, bound in one volume.

A fascinating view of the taste of London high society in the year 1826, with the steady rise of the Gothic taste in interiors, and the profits from the slave trade in architecture.

Complete with 30 handcoloured engravings of fashion, landscapes, architecture and furniture, 6 engravings of needlework patterns.

Each issue typically with two handcoloured architecture plates, two handcoloured London fashion plates, one handcoloured interior plate (furniture, curtains, etc.) and one needlework pattern.

The fashion plates unsigned but attributed to the Arbiter Elegantiarum (Thomas Uwins). There are promenade, carriage, evening, dinner and ball gowns by Miss Davis of Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, along with other dresses by anonymous designers and milliners.

The architecture plates mostly landscape scenes showing stately homes and gardens of the aristocracy by John Gendall. These include slave owner Bertie Greatheed's mansion Guy's Cliff; slave owner Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard's Gothic house Belhus; slave owner Lady Molesworth's house Pencarrow; architect John Nash's Gothic folly East Cowes Castle; Scottish inventor James Watt's Jacobean Aston Hall; Sir George Beaumont's Coleorton House; the Duke of Newcastle's Clumber Park, etc.

The furniture plates show a massive Gothic window with stained glass arches behind velvet drapes, a Gothic writing table, a Gothic bed with canopy, three Gothic chairs, etc.

Ackermann's Repository of Arts ran from 1809 to 1828. At four shillings an issue, it was an expensive magazine, aimed at the very richest of English society. In addition to the luxurious colour plates, the text offered travel writing, poetry, French fashion reports, art gallery reviews, literary criticism, society gossip, music reviews, general news and legal reports.

Leather bindings with gilt title, year and volume number, spine with five raised bands rubbed, marble boards scuffed, marble endpapers, interior free of foxing, but a few finger smudges and spots, all plates with fine colouring under tissue guards.