Album of Caricatures and Photos of an Austro-Hungarian Army Unit Stationed in Northern Italy, circa early 1860s.

Full Morocco. Very Good. Fabulous collection of army caricatures, as well as actual photos of many of the soldiers and officers. The artwork has an inimitable naive, folk art-ish and outsider art-ish quality that is simply captivating. Even with the captions mostly unreadable by us written as they are in an indecipherable Suettelin Schrift, the humor and narrative generally comes through very clearly. The artwork is mostly focused on the soldiers' lifestyle -- hunting, womanizing and wooing, drinking and carousing, day to day activities, and other than their being in uniform mostly, relatively light on actual military matters. Early 1860s, before Austria lost much of Northern Italy. Oblong. 23.5 by 29 cm. 67 pp. with content. First, 22 pp. of photos, with 82 photos in all, with all but two individual oval portraits. Then 35 pp. of painted caricatures, containing 40 mounted pieces, one of which has a fold-out and thus is larger than the page, a few are full page size, and several form multi-part narrative series, like a cartoon strip. About half of these are thickly or thoroughly painted, while the rest may have a combination of pencil and watercolor, and simple or no background to the drawn human figures. 8 pp. of portraits, one painted, the others, drawn with pencil or printed. 2 pp. of mixed media photo caricatures (16 such caricatures, which generally have photo imaged heads combined with drawn bodies, all of which is contained in a photo image). Condition: two inch chip to lower spine. Leather on boards rubbed and worn. Moderate soiling to the album's leaves, with a few corner creases, etc.