559 - Biedermeier friendship album, Potsdam, coloured prints, embossed picture and gilt edges, from 1836

Biedermeier friendship album, Potsdam, coloured prints, embossed picture and gilt edges, from 1836 Paper, card and marbled paper. Friendship album in landscape format, red binding with embossed scroll decoration and gold-coloured border, marbled endpapers and marbled cover, gilt edges. About 10 entries from 1836 in Kurrent script, several dated Potsdam 1836, among them a calligraphic dedication leaf "Zum Andenken der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet" with heart and scrolls. Some with prints or locks of hair as keepsakes, among them coloured prints of a farewell scene at a harbour with verses and a female figure with Cupid, and an embossed picture with gold-coloured border, coloured figures with flower basket and the inscription "Freundschaft sei Dir ein Talisman des Glücks." Condition commensurate with age, rubbed, slightly browned and stained, cover with loss and heavy wear. 11x17.5x2 cm (HxWxD) The friendship album developed from the Stammbuch, which arose among students in the 16th century as the album amicorum and collected mottoes, dedications and drawings by friends and teachers. In the 19th century the friendship album moved into the private bourgeois sphere; friends and relatives wrote verses and wishes in it as keepsakes. Typical contents included inserted locks of hair, dried flowers, romantic pictures and later scraps. The album dates from the Biedermeier period between 1815 and 1848, when bourgeois domesticity shaped life. Besides Stammbuch, the Latin term liber amicorum is also used for such friendship books, and individual keepsake pages are called Andenkenblätter.