Beschreibung:

SAUDI ARABIA – Gerald Simpson Hillairet Rutland Vere DE GAURY (1897-1984). 106 individual photographs of Ibn Saud (1875-1953), first monarch and founder of Saudi Arabia, together with his family, royal household and entourage, and including the royal palace at Riyadh, and various landscape and desert scenes. c.1939-1940. A very rare and extensive archive of photographs of Saudi Arabia, and its founder, on the cusp of the discovery of oil, taken by one of the earliest Britons to enter Riyadh. This collection includes images of Ibn Saud with some of his sons, HRH the Emir Mansur, HRH The Emir Mitaab, Yusif Yassin, the king's private secretary, royal falconers, other family members and servants of the royal household, as well as images of Bedouin in camp and with their livestock, and architectural images of Riyadh, including a self-portrait of the photographer on the rooftop of the royal palace. The total number of photographs comes to 131, with a number in duplicate, and four negatives. De Gaury was a British military officer, Arabist, explorer, historian and diplomat. Wounded four times during the First World War, De Gaury later served as the British political agent in Kuwait in the 1930s. In 1934, he travelled from Jeddah overland to Kuwait, stopping at Riyadh for his first audience with Ibn Saud, making De Gaury one of the first half-dozen Britons to enter the city. The following year he helped organize, and took part in, the official visit of Sir Andrew Ryan to Riyadh in November 1935, to present Ibn Saud with the Order of the Bath. This is described in De Gaury's book, Arabia Phoenix (London, 1946), in which some of the photographs present here in this lot are reproduced; a copy of the book, along with his memoir, Traces of Travel Brought Home from Abroad (London, 1983) in which the 1934 visit is described in detail, are included in the lot, as is De Gaury's biography Travelling Gent . The life of Alexander Kinglake (1809-1891) (London, 1972). These latter two contain authorial presentation inscriptions to Robert Heber Percy (1911-1987).