A large albumen print of two tabby cats posed at a game of chess, titled “Chess” in the negative and mounted on an illustrated album page where an owl presides above and mice creep below. The page joins three Victorian enthusiasms: comic animal photography, chess, and the decorated album.<BR><BR>One cat sits upright on a round stool with its back to the camera, striped coat filling the foreground and a forepaw resting on the board. Its opponent has climbed onto the tabletop and crouches over the pieces, ears forward, eyes fixed on the other player. Between them stand turned chessmen crowded at mid-game, among them two kings topped with crosses and a pair of carved knights. The title is lettered in white along the table edge. A paned window and a spindle rail fill the background.<BR><BR>The border frames the print in rustic twig trellis wound with ivy. Above, an eared owl perches before a stone arch, with a ruined tower in the distance and a potted vine at the crown. Below, a mouse creeps along each end of the base. Owl and cats are both mousers, so the page reads from top to bottom as hunters, game and quarry. The monogram “BSC” appears at lower center.<BR><BR>The staging belongs to the 1870s vogue for cats photographed at human pastimes. Harry Pointer of Brighton led the genre from about 1870 with his “Brighton Cats,” captioned prints that buyers exchanged like greeting cards. He had issued more than one hundred by 1872 and over two hundred by 1884. This example is unattributed. The subject also recalls Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), which opens with Alice, her kittens and a chess set, and the owl above the cats invites comparison with Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” of the same years.<BR><BR>Measures 11 1/4" x 8 1/2", the image is 3 3/4" x 2 1/2"