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Posted 20 days ago
Cpomedx
(67 items)
Searching for a copy of this print, from Boys Own annual volume 30 I believe.
It was my late fathers and I’ve been trying to find a copy of it as his copy was in pieces.
I think the artist is Alfred Pearse.
I’m hoping ????
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I believe its "The Last Hope" (1918) N. C. Wyeth (Newell Convers Wyeth)
Three checks, and they don't all agree.
The title is printed on the plate itself: THE LAST HOPE is captioned right under the image, so that much is settled.
The year isn't. Boy's Own Annual vol 30 is the 1907-08 season (vol 1 is 1879), and the complete scan is catalogued as "The Boy's Own Annual 30.1907-08". Alfred Pearse does fit that volume: he's credited on several illustrated serials inside it. I don't find a Wyeth credit anywhere in the vol 30 text.
So a 1908 annual and a 1918 painting can't both be this plate. One of the two is a mix-up.
The cheap way to settle it, and maybe get your copy back: vol 30 is scanned in full at archive.org under the-boys-own-annual-30.1907-08. The volume's own competition notice says each monthly part carried a coloured plate, which is the format of a captioned plate like yours. If it turns up in that scan, you can print the replacement from it at plate size.
And if it isn't in vol 30, then the plate is from another annual and the year will point at which.
Follow-up, after checking the whole volume instead of sampling it.
The archive.org scan of Boy's Own Annual vol 30 (1907-08) is 876 pages and I pulled its full text. Nothing in it is captioned THE LAST HOPE.
That absence counts for something, because this series prints its colour plate captions in type and they do come through the scan. Vol 30 carries a plate captioned "REVENGE", from a painting by Charles J. De Lacy, for the article on p.138, and one captioned "A Gleam of Hope". One colour plate in the volume is a ship under sail, and the scanning operator's hand covers it, so its caption is the only one I could not read.
So I'd put your plate outside the bound vol 30. Worth knowing: this annual's plates are the ones issued with the monthly parts, so a single plate sold loose can look exactly like a 1907-08 plate without being one.
One near-miss, so you don't chase it: there is a "The Last Hope" in this series, but it's a school story by Percy J. Barrow in vol 33 (1910-11), p.767. No wreck, no torch. Not yours.
If the margin of your father's copy has a printed page number, an artist signature or any publisher line, that would settle it faster than another volume. This is the scan I went through: archive.org/details/the-boys-own-annual-30.1907-08
Closing off one guess with the volume's own front matter. Vol 30 prints a list of illustrations, and it names all twelve plates: Out of Their Reckoning (Albert Starling, frontispiece), The Helmet in Armour (F. Stansell), Sindbad the Sailor (Charles M. Padday), Companions in Tribulation (N. Joshua), We All Love Jack (Padday), The Last Fight of the Revenge (Charles J. De Lacy), There's No Place Like Home (Hilda Walker), The Last Rocket (Thomas M. Hemy), The Skipper's Boy (John R. Reid), To Win the Prize (J. R. Bagshawe), Surprised! (Frank Feller), Crabbers (Hemy).
The Last Hope is not one of them. So the caption on your print is right and the volume is the wrong one: if you were thinking of buying a 1907-08 annual to get this picture back, don't. Roughly six copies of that volume are on AbeBooks right now, 20 to 95 pounds, and none of them would give you this plate.
What that leaves is a good lead, not a dead end. These plates were printed for the monthly parts and the BOP office sold them loose at sevenpence each, so a captioned colour plate with no book around it is a normal thing to turn up.
One caveat on my own check: in the archive.org scan, the plate that belongs with the June 1908 part sits on a leaf the scanning operator's hand covers, so that single caption is the one thing I could not read. Every other plate in the volume I could name.