Art

A unique copy of the first edition of this rare map, one of the earliest to name Abu Dhabi, given here as "Abuthubbi". It is extensively annotated by William Henry Shippard (1805-1865), a British Army officer, and was used by him presumably while assembling material for his illustrated lecture on "The History of the Arabs", given in London in April 1844. Shippard was the son of Admiral Alexander Shippard and pursued a career in the army, serving with the 29th Foot. During the period of his service in the 1830s, his regiment was on garrison duty in Mauritius. On his retirement from the army in 1839 he became a director of a London life insurance company, but his spare time was taken up with ethnographical and historical researches. He was a close friend of the American artist George Catlin, famous for his depiction of Native Americans. Shippard was keen to establish a "Museum of Mankind", and in this regard Catlin mentions him in his Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe, with His North American Indian Collection (1848): "the noble and unaided efforts of my best of friends, Captain Shippard, to bring into existence such an institution are, I believe, too well known and appreciated by the English public"; in his book he gives an outline of the intentions of Shippard's museum in volume one, appendix B. Shippard's 1844 lecture was positively reviewed by the influential British periodical the Athenaeum: "an exhibition of a novel and pleasing kind A unique copy of the first edition of this rare map, one of the earliest to name Abu Dhabi, given here as "Abuthubbi". It is extensively annotated by William Henry Shippard (1805-1865), a British Army officer, and was used by him presumably while assembling material for his illustrated lecture on "The History of the Arabs", given in London in April 1844. Shippard was the son of Admiral Alexander Shippard and pursued a career in the army, serving with the 29th Foot. During the period of his service in the 1830s, his regiment was on garrison duty in Mauritius. On his retirement from the army in 1839 he became a director of a London life insurance company, but his spare time was taken up with ethnographical and historical researches. He was a close friend of the American artist George Catlin, famous for his depiction of Native Americans. Shippard was keen to establish a "Museum of Mankind", and in this regard Catlin mentions him in his Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe, with His North American Indian Collection (1848): "the noble and unaided efforts of my best of friends, Captain Shippard, to bring into existence such an institution are, I believe, too well known and appreciated by the English public"; in his book he gives an outline of the intentions of Shippard's museum in volume one, appendix B. Shippard's 1844 lecture was positively reviewed by the influential British periodical the Athenaeum: "an exhibition of a novel and pleasing kind drew together a numerous assemblage … at Miss Kelly's Theatre in Dean Street [Soho]. It was a lecture on the History of the Arabs, by Capt. Shippard, illustrated by scenery painted for the occasion. The illustrations, copied on a very large scale from the drawings of Laborde, Owen Jones, and others, were extremely beautiful, and called forth much applause". Shippard appears to have been annotating this map even in the last year of his life, as he writes in the top corner, "as to the interior of Arabia cf. Palgrave's Travels". This is a reference to William Gifford Palgrave's Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (2 vols., 1865). Until the 20th century, geographical and topographical information on the vast central region of present-day Saudi Arabia, known as Najd, was notably sketchy. Shippard's annotations reveal his extensive reading on the region, drawing on the work of, amongst others, the Ayyubid dynasty geographer Abu al-Fida (Abulfeda, 1273-1331), the Arab geographer Muhammed al-Idrisi (1100-1165), and George Forster Sadleir (1789-1859), the first recorded British traveller to enter the Najd. The map is based on the pioneering work of Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) and was collated with the explorations of the German naturalists L. G. Ehrenberg (1795-1876) and Eduard Rüppell (1794-1884), both of whom explored extensively in the region. It extends west to east from the "Lybian Desert" to "Ras-el-Had" and north to south from the Nile Delta to "Lake Tanzania". Many of the place names on the Gulf coast, including Dubai and Sir Bani Yas Island, had been recorded in print as early as 1590, by the Venetian jeweller and merchant Gasparo Balbi, who travelled with Portuguese trading vessels. These were transliterated in Italian, but Abu Dhabi was not mentioned. The history of the modern settlement begins in 1793, when the Bani Yas Bedouin moved to the island in search of fresh water, and so the name did not appear on maps until the early 1800s. Consequently, this is one of the earliest printed maps to name Abu Dhabi. It also includes inset plans of Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. We have traced just two institutional copies in the UK (British Library, Durham University); 11 in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland; and two in the United States (Library of Congress, Harvard); there appear to be none in Middle East libraries. Six copies have appeared at auction since 1998. Provenance: William Henry Shippard, thence by descent through the family. READ MORE Engraved map with contemporary hand-colouring (810 x 935 mm), engraved by Adolph Maedel, subsequently edged with black linen and mounted on linen support; extended flap to upper centre left (showing as far as Aleppo), rectangular slip covering the engraved trompe-l'oeil route annotated in pen and ink giving numerous locations and travellers' routes in pen and ink. Float mounted, framed and glazed 945 x 1,055 mm Handling creases, surface finger soiling and browning, signs of extensive use, small pin holes.