(BASEBALL) October 15, 1859-Dated, Historic Harper’s Weekly Newspaper Illustration of a Cricket and Baseball Match, Double-Page Engraving, Framed, Very Fine.
This early Baseball double-page wood engraving from Harper's Weekly of October 15, 1859, is among the most historically significant sports images in all of American printed history, capturing on a single sheet the two great bat-and-ball games of the mid-nineteenth century at one of their most consequential shared moments. The upper engraving documents the celebrated international cricket match played at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, between the touring All England Eleven and the United States Twenty-Two, one of the most widely publicized sporting events in American history to that date. The lower engraving is of arguably even greater long-term significance: one of the earliest and most important published visual records of baseball as played in the period immediately before the Civil War, at the very ground where the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club had formalized the rules of the modern game in the 1840s. The accompanying text column explains both games to contemporary American readers, a remarkable period document of the transitional moment when baseball was beginning its ascent to become the national pastime. Framed in modern metal frame, measures about 23 x 16.5 inches (by sight) under special UV Plexiglas with a viewable portion of the printed reverse showing the actual typeset article in the newspaper that is fully readable. The strongest direct comparable is the SCP Auctions sale of September 2011, 15 years ago, where a framed and matted example of the same Harper's Weekly 1859 baseball match at the Elysian Fields woodcut sold for $1,220.40 including buyer's premium, described as having one vertical crease from the original fold as the only condition issue (likely this very item).

[Antebellum Period, Sports History, 19th Century America] [Baseball, Cricket, Knickerbocker Base Ball Club] [Newspapers, Engravings, Printed Americana]