File:Margaret's Isle, Budapest, Hungary, Austro-Hungary.tif

English: This late-19th century photochrome print is from “Views of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” in the catalog of the Detroit Publishing Company. It depicts Margaret Baths on Margaret Island. The building was designed by Miklós Ybl and construction began in 1868. It consisted of three wings with a renaissance-influenced octagonal dome. It was destroyed during the Second World War.

Margaret Island (Margitsziget, in Hungarian) is a 2.5-kilometer long island in the Danube River in central Budapest. According to Baedeker’s Austria, Including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia, and Bosnia (1900), the island was “the property of Archduke Joseph, who has converted it, at an outlay of several million florins, into a most delightful park.” Margaret Island was named for Saint Margaret (1242-70), the daughter of King Béla IV, who founded a nunnery on the island and vowed to send his daughter, Princess Margaret, to the nunnery if he was able to rebuild his country after the Mongol invasion. The Detroit Photographic Company was launched as a photographic publishing firm in the late 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr. and photographer and photo-publisher Edwin H. Husher. They obtained the exclusive rights to use the Swiss "Photochrom" process for converting black-and-white photographs into color images and printing them by photolithography. This process permitted the mass production of color postcards, prints, and albums for sale to the American market. The firm became the Detroit Publishing Company in 1905.

Physical Description: 1 photomechanical print : photochrom, color

Notes:

Print no. "9201".

Title from the Detroit Publishing Co., Catalogue J--foreign section, Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Publishing Company, 1905.