GRAF

The card is 4.5 x 7.5 cm, with 'Le Comte Moltke | Grand Veneur du Roi.' engraved in copperplate. In fair condition, aged and with slight staining from previous mounting on the reverse. The Moltke family originated in Mecklenburg, and by the eighteenth century members were prominent figures in the Danish court. Friedrich Philip Victor von Moltke settled in Holstein in 1805, and was left impoverished when the French army plundered his town house in Lübeck, and burned his country house. On 2 January 1819 the Journal de Paris carried a report from Berlin that on 22 December 1818 'M.

EXCESSIVELY RARE. Apparently not present in the National Portrait Gallery collection. The portrait is on a piece of India paper roughly four and a half inches by three and a half wide, mounted on a piece of thick wove paper roughly eleven inches by eight and a half wide. The mount bears the text. Good, though somewhat grubby, and with the mount lightly creased and foxed. While Sayers is best-known as a Pittite caricaturist this image is certainly not a caricature.