Today I digitised four of John Hall the Younger's (1771–1830) original sketchbooks. The books come from a castle library and had been lent to my client for the day, so the scanning had to be done against the clock. A really fun assignment!
John Hall the Younger was the son of the wealthy Gothenburg merchant John Hall the Elder, who built Gunnebo House in Mölndal as the family's summer residence. The son inherited both the trading house and Gunnebo in 1802, but the trading house went bankrupt in 1807 and he died penniless in Stockholm in 1830. He was artistically gifted and had studied drawing under Louis Jean Desprez. His life story later became a novel by Sophie Elkan.
Among the drawings are several views of Gunnebo: the north entrance front with its columned portico, statues and potted trees, the south garden front with its double flight of steps, and the park — “Vue af en del af Gunnebo – Södra Park & Äng” (View of part of Gunnebo – South Park & Meadow). In one of the books Hall also wrote a list of his sketchbooks, arranged by province, in which one line probably reads “Vuer af Gunnebo – 2 Böcker” (Views of Gunnebo – 2 books).
Most of the drawings are in pencil, but some are in ink or watercolour. The subjects come from journeys in Sweden — Trollhättan and Lilla Edet, Borås, Skara, Billingen, Läckö and Öland — but there are also stage sketches, among them from The Magic Flute and Der Freischütz, and copies of the royal portraits at Gripsholm.
Labels on the covers, dated 1878, tell us that the books were part of a set of nine, and that the attribution to John Hall was confirmed by comparison with his drawings at the Gothenburg Museum.
The sketchbooks were scanned spread by spread at 600 dpi in colour on our Image Access Bookeye 5 V1 Archive, with a glass plate holding the pages flat. In total there were 473 images.
Read more about our service for book scanning — we also digitise sketchbooks, manuscripts and other fragile originals with gentle overhead scanning.