(Benjamin Franklin) | "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"

(Benjamin Franklin)

Moral Pictures, or Poor Richard Illustrated. Being Lessons for the Young and the Old, on Industry, Temperance, Frugality, &c By the late Dr. Benj. Franklin. [No place or printer, ca. 1810]

Broadside printed in sanguine on linen (450 x 615 mm). 25 oval vignettes with aphoristic captions, including a portrait of Franklin, each after Robert Dighton; foxed, top right corner fraying slightly, top and bottom margin trimmed close. Glazed and framed, stitched onto a cloth mat (560 x 720 mm).

Rare sanguine printing of this illustrated broadside on linen featuring Franklin's clever maxims on industry.

Across its 25 vignettes, the broadside visually depicts several of Franklin's aphorisms from The Way to Wealth, including "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and "When the well is dry, they know the worth of water."

This issue of Moral Pictures is evidently unrecorded. Most eighteenth-century editions, including a version in the form of a jigsaw puzzle, have either the London imprint of Bowles and Carver or the Manchester imprint of Bancks & Co., though versions of this instructive pictorial continued to be published until the mid-nineteenth century.

REFERENCES

Cf. Ford 137*; American Philosophical Society Mss.973.C683