History
The print was produced in a single state, although there are variations on the printing. The British Museum has a number of copies of the subscription ticket, made out to various subscribers, and an example of a later version, which lacked the subscription information but had the addition of "Design'd and Etch'd by Wm Hogarth Decem 1. 1753." below the image, survives in the Hunterian Museum. The unannotated version is believed to have been used as a frontispiece for some copies of the Analysis of Beauty. In 1754, Hogarth was advertising separate copies of Columbus Breaking the Egg for one shilling. Unusually, the original copperplate survived the First World War when many of Hogarth's plates were scrapped to produce material for munitions and aircraft. Quaritch, the owner of a large number of Hogarth's original plates, donated many to the Government to help the war effort, but the plate of Columbus Breaking the Egg was sold to Charles Scribner's Sons in 1921 and later sold on to a private collector. The Royal Library has an unfinished version of the scene, which Nichols believed to be a proof, but Paulson dismisses as an "extremely cunning copy ... left unfinished or purposely made to resemble an unfinished proof."
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)