When Cheney died in 1884, he bequeathed his estate to his nephew Alfred Capel-Cure (1826-1896).

While his art collection was sold off at an auction, a 1905 catalog in the archive of Ellis Waterhouse at the Getty Research Institute contains a hand-written comment noting that Edward Cheney’s papers were destroyed due to a dispute amongst his heirs. It is auspicious that Capel-Cure, who created his own calotypes of British landscapes and friends, inherited and kept the extremely rare Lecchi album.

The survival of the Lecchi album bears witness as much to the Italian Risorgimento as to the British sensibility towards the value of photography.

The Cheney album was sold to an American collector in London in the 1960s by the antiquarian Ernest Seligmann. In 2002 the Getty Research Institute acquired the album from a New York dealer, Hans Kraus.

(Isotta Poggi)