Washington Irving's Illustrations for the Legend of Rip Van Winkle, Designed and Etched by F.O.C. Darley

Darley's lithographs illustrate Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," which tells of villagers of Dutch descent living in upstate New York at the end of the British colonial period. The feckless primary character infuriates his wife by avoiding work. He prefers to play with local children, or to socialize with a "perpetual club of sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village" outside a local inn. When he takes an autumn ramble into the Catskills, Rip encounters men dressed in old-fashioned garb, playing at nine-pins, who resemble Henry Hudson's band of early seventeenth-century explorers. After tasting their liquor, Rip falls asleep and wakes after twenty years have passed, returns to his village and finds himself in post-Revolutionary America.

The set of prints was issued as a supplement to subscribers of the American Art-Union in 1848. The main large engraving they received that year was "The Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey," by Charles Burt after Daniel Huntington.

Plate 1. Rip Van Winkle's idleness enrages his wife.
Plate 2. Rip Van Winkle plays with his children instead of working.
Plate 3. Rip Van Winkle frequents "a perpetual club of sages, philosophers,and other idle personages of the village" outside his local inn.
Plate 4. Rip Van Winkle meets "a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins" in a deep ravine of the Catskills.
Plate 5. After sleeping for twenty years, Rip Van Winkle returns home to find his house in ruins.
Plate 6. Rip Van Winkle talks to veterans of the American Revolution outside Johnathan Doolittle's Union Inn.