3-053-825 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Grandmother's Treasures", by W. Holyoake, 1873. Engraving of a painting. 'In this pleasant picture the artist has ingeniously conceived an incident which...has...furnished him with an opportunity for artistically utilising many objects of the kind which usually go to make up the heterogeneous picturesqueness of an artist's studio...On the floor there is a scrapbook or "album"...Among the other volumes - those in the cabinet - we should expect to find old "keepsakes"...Old-fashioned embroidery (which that little girl eyes so curiously), "antique" lace, scraps of old brocade, and peacocks' feathers - fit emblems of cast-off vanities - are not wanting; nor the favourite little old mirror, which so long pictured Vanity to itself. Then there [are]...stuffed birds, sea-shells, a bowl of large egg-shells, shears of Oriental pattern, which seem to intimate that grandpapa (when he resembled the youthful portrait on the wall) was a traveller...Lastly, there is the concealed pile of guineas, sad testimony to the miserly propensities of age. The seventeenth or early eighteenth century carved cabinet is an appropriate receptacle for such "treasures".' From "Illustrated London News", 1873.