PPEELMAN, Arie - Auf den Spuren Abrahams: Das Heilige Land in alten handkolorierten Photographien

Background information

"Bazaars in Jerusalem, wells with scooping wheels, women at millstones, camel caravans moving through the desert, shepherds, traders, pilgrims: this glamorous illustrated book shows the Holy Land as it looked 80 years ago. Anyone traveling through the Middle East around 1920, when these pictures were taken, might still feel reminded of the time of Jesus.
The editor of the illustrated book 'In the Footsteps of Abraham', Helen Speelman, is the granddaughter of the Orient pioneer Arie Speelman and editor. The slides for the book came from the collection of the Dutch Oriental traveler, who toured Palestine between 1926 and 1931. The Speelman collection was later donated to the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. Arie Speelman had his slides, some of which he had taken himself in the Holy Land and some of which he had purchased locally from the legendary 'American Colony' and later showed on lecture tours through Holland, hand-colored with oil paints by Eric Matsson and his wife and assistant Edith Yantiss. This was an extraordinarily laborious and costly process, but before the invention of color photography, it was the only way to achieve a color image close to the original. Speelman's granddaughter, Helen Speelman, and journalist Richard Hardiman have selected the finest 175 images in the collection for this book, with text from Arie Speelman's travel diary." (© Pattloch Verlag, 2008)

Contents

The historic, hand-colored photographs in the illustrated book 'Auf den Spuren Abrahams: Das Heilige Land in alten handkolorierten Photographien' transport the viewer to an archaic, submerged world. It is as if a photographer had traveled through the land in biblical times. The landscape in Palestine was barren and stony, its inhabitants seem exotic and strange to us, shortly before intensive settlement began and the modern world arrived. (...)

Additional information about the condition of the volume offered here

Vintage Copy: antiquarian copy with partly visible traces of use. Well suited as a working copy. Original Title: The Well of Abraham, The Holy Land in Hand Painted Photographs