1862.b.20

Photograph album bound in maroon half-leather and brown buckram, measuring 317 x 455 mm, with leather title panel laid down on front cover, with brass clasp; edges gilt. Inscribed 'Ex Libris Alfred Jones [?]Batte' on front free endpaper. The album is bound and compiled in the standard style of the Burke studio (compare duplicate copy at APAC Photo 487) and contains 100 prints mounted one to a page (recto and verso) on stiff card leaves, with captions written in ink in a neat hand beneath each image, together with the photographer's negative reference number (which does not follow the running order of the prints) written beneath the bottom left corner of each photograph. The album provides a broadly chronological record of the British advance into Afghanistan, from Attock in the Punjab, across the Khyber Pass to Jalababad, ending with a series of group portraits associated with the signing of the Treaty of Gandamak between the Amir Yakub Khan and the British in May 1879. This treaty, part of the terms of which allowed for the installation of a British Resident at Kabul, was thought at the time to have resolved the Afghan isssue. The murder of the resident, Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari (who negotiated the treaty and who is present in a number of portraits in the album), at Kabul in September 1879, precipitated the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and the occupation of Kabul. Several of the views and portraits at the start of the album predate these events by over a decade: the views at Peshawar (prints 6-7), for instance, were taken between 1860 and 1864, while the portraits of Amir Sher Ali Khan (prints 1-2), were taken at Jamrud on his return from the Ambala Durbar with Lord Mayo in March 1869.