May 18, 2006 - Sale 2080

Sale 2080 - Lot 16

Price Realized: $ 299,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 190,000 - $ 220,000
"BY THEE I DRAW" TRIPE, LINNAEUS (1822-1902)
Rare set entitled "Burma Views," with 112 (of 120) early photographs of Burma [Myanmar]. Salted paper prints from calotype wax paper negatives, 10x13 1/2 inches (25.5x34 cm.), tipped to the mount, with Tripe's signature on recto, a period caption, plate number, and a blind stamp of Tripe's logo with the imprint "By Thee I Draw" on mount recto. 1857
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

from the family collection of maharaja shri bharat singh dev, of tripurah, india; to a private collector. British-born Linnaeus Tripe was a career army officer in the Madras establishment of the East India Company. His first photographic assignment was as official photographer to the British mission to Burma, in June 1855. According to Tripe scholar Janet Dewan, "Lord Dalhousie was arranging a mission to Amerapoora to obtain a treaty in which Mindon Min, the king of Burma, would formally recognize the annexation of the Burmese province of Pegy by the the British following the Anglo-Burmese War of 1852." The addition of a photographer was integral to the mission's success since the King was fascinated with the new art of "sun pictures." Thus, Dalhousie proposed Capt. Linneaus Tripe as "Artist in Photography" to supplement the skills of Henry Yule, resident draftsman.

Tripe frequently worked independently and, though he did no printing in Burma, developed his negatives on site. Tripe's proto-modernist photographs were apparently the first images of Burma and seem oddly contemporary in their formal composition. In 1857, a full set of "Burma Views" was shown at the Madras Photographic Society, where it was hailed as "excellent; remarkable for great distinctness and also for their unusual and beautiful tint." Dewan notes that "When he returned to Calcutta in December 1855, Tripe printed a small selection of Burma negatives for government officials. And, in that same month, Tripe and Yule had selected 120 from Tripe's 219 negatives as those "that it appeared to us most desirable" to print for the government. "

Photographic history is replete with stories demonstrating the arduous art of producing photographs in inhospitable environments. Tripe, eager to please his superiors, anticipated making "240 prints a week." Instead, from January through May 1856, the sun's heat actually "melted the wax used on his paper negatives"--circumstances that severely impacted his productivity rate. By the autumn, despite prevailing monsoon conditions, an undaunted Tripe completed the requisite 6500 plus prints to meet the Government's requirements by November 1856. Subsequent months were spent mounting his prodigious output. Although Tripe recorded 50 sets of his magisterial images, few complete suites have survived into the twentieth century.