A Georgian 'make your own landscape' pastime

CLARK, John Heaviside.

[Myriorama: A Collection of Many Thousand Landscapes, Designed by Mr Clark.]
London: Samuel Leigh, 1824. 16 numbered aquatints on card, with original hand colour, as called for, each 200 x 70mm, total if joined 200 x 1120mm.

Lacking box, minor surface abrasion to a few cards.

A rare complete set of sixteen cards, cleverly designed so that they could be laid together randomly but would still form a cohesive scene. According to the Huntington Library (https://huntington.org/verso/look-myriorama), just the sixteen cards could generate 20,922,789,888,000 combinations! Each card is numbered so that a particularly pleasing scene could be recorded and recreated.
John Heaviside Clark (c.1771-1863), a Scottish painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1801 and 1832, gained the nickname 'Waterloo Clark' for his sketches of the battlefield soon after the fighting in 1815. At the time of the publication of these cards, he was working on a series of large aquatint views of Scottish towns.
The Myriorama was invented by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Brès sometime in the early 19th century, with the intention of inspiring landscape artists. News of the game's popularity spread, and this was the first to be issued in Britain. The cards depict the scenery of England and Scotland, with mountains, cottages, castles and ruins. Later in 1824 Clark & Leigh published a set with Italianate scenery.


Stock ID : 23843