Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

Oblong folio (273 x 330 mm). 154 albumen photographs (most 178 x 229 mm), mounted recto and verso of each album leaf, images captioned in manuscript on the mount below the image, many signed in white ink or in the negative by Taylor. (Light soiling and staining in margins of mounts, one album leaf detached and torn.) Bound to style in half dark purple morocco, spine gilt-lettered, marbled endpapers.

A REMARKABLE ALBUM OF EARLY CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHY.

Taylor was a bookseller and stationer before fashioning himself a commercial photographer in the late 1880s. Today, Taylor is recognized as a pioneering photographer of architecture, working in Chicago at the very beginning of the skyscraper era. The present album presents a relatively comprehensive view of Chicago's architecture and life during one of the city's most interesting and vibrant periods, from the highest of buildings to the interiors of pig pens in the stockyards, with numerous residences, parks, lush interiors, the 1893 World's Fair, and more.

Taylor's importance as one of the earliest significant architectural photographers is addressed in Peter Bacon Hales' Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939: "Photographers of the older generation managed to retain their identities even as they adjusted to their more prosaic role as visual adjuncts to the architects who designed the buildings they photographed. J.W. Taylor of Chicago, for example, made an extensive survey of the 'modern' buildings of Chicago and its environs, many of which traveled throughout the globe as architects and engineers converged on the city in the later 1800s and beyond to see the miracle of the Chicago style of building. Taylor's pictures went as far as Melbourne, Australia, in the collection of Australian architect E.G. Kilburn, who made his pilgrimage to the architects' mecca in 1889. Kilburn stared, sketched, and took notes; then he brought back photographs by Taylor of everything from the Pullman company town to the Palmer House."

A general summary of the photographs in the album is as follows: forty-two buildings including the Masonic Temple (the tallest skyscraper in the world at the time), the Woman's Temple, the Rookery Building, the Chamber of Commerce, the Monadnock Building, the Northern Hotel, the Home Insurance Building, the Tacoma Building, the Caxton Building, the Pullman Building, the Oakland Hotel, the Grand Pacific Hotel, Palmer House, the Auditorium Building, Marshall Field's, the Lester Building, the Hotel Metropole, Libby Prison, the New Regiment Armory, depots, and churches; seven downtown street scenes including Haymarket Square; seventeen residential streets, including Lake Shore Dr. and Michigan Ave., and residences of prominent citizens, including Potter Palmer and Lambert Tree; twenty parks, pavilions, and recreation scenes; three of Grant Monument and its unveiling; ten Lincoln Park scenes, some with animals; three of Garfield Park; ten featuring World's Fair building construction; nine views of the October 1892 World's Fair dedication, showing ceremonies and a large parade; two scenes of boating; twelve views of stockyards and meat processing, six exterior and interior views of an auditorium; eight interiors including Palmer House and a bank; and three scenes of horse racing at Washington Park.

Taylor's photographs reside in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago (fifty-six images) and the Chicago History Museum (150 images). The subject matter of those collections and the present work overlaps significantly, a testament to the prodigious nature of Taylor's output.