1. VITTORIO SELLA. Mischabelhorner and Alphubel, c. 1879-1892, Sella number AVIII 139. 11.4x15.5" collodion print, printed c. 1893, mounted on 16 1/2x12 1/8" heavy brown board. Inscribed in ink on mount recto: Alps 139. Mischabelhorner and Alphubel VIII; Print recto embossed with artist's credit stamp in bottom right corner; Stamped in ink on mount verso: Depose / Tous Droits Reserves / V. Stella - Biella; Inscribed in pencil: Loan 77 (circled).

2. VITTORIO SELLA. Alps the Weissmies,
c. 1879-1892, Sella number AVIII 128. 11.4x15.2" albumen print, printed c. 1893, mounted on 17 1/8x13 5/8" heavy black board. Inscribed in white ink on mount recto: Alps The Weissmies; Inscribed in pencil on mount verso: 191/ VIII 1773; Paper label with red boarder attached to mount verso inscribed in ink: gift of/ Miss Anna Chace; Print recto embossed with artist's credit stamp in bottom right corner.

Mischabelhörner or Mischabel is a massif in the Pennine Alps of Valais, Switzerland. is a mountain in Valais and has an elevation of 4361 metres. The Dom is the highest peak of this massif at 4,545 m (14,911 ft), third highest mountain in the Alps and second highest in Switzerland.

The Weissmies 4,017 m (13,179 ft) is in the Pennien Alps in the canton of Valais in Switzerland is the easternmost peak in this range above 4000 m. The Simplon Pass (French: Col du Simplon; German: Simplonpass; Italian: Passo del Sempione) (2,005 m or 6,578 ft) is a high mountain pass between the Pennine Alps and the Lepontine Alps in Switzerland. It connects Brig in the canton of Valais with Domodossola in Piedmont (Italy). The pass itself and the villages on each side of it, such as Gondo, are in Switzerland.

Vittorio Sella (1859-1943) began serious mountain climbing and photography when he was a teenager mastering the wet plate technique and making panoramas by 1880. By 1879 he began to use dry plates and in 1880 began a series of winter views in the Alps. Every holiday, summer and winter, Sella was in the nearby mountains, often carrying an old photographic apparatus that had belonged to his father.

He climbed and photographed in the Alps annually making the first winter ascents of a number or prominent peaks including the Matterhorn in 1882 and the first winter hike across Mont Blanc in 1884. His panoramas were up to 12 plates and 360 degrees. Photography and mountain climbing were family affairs, and most climbs would be with his brother Erminio a couple of other companions and guides including Daniel Maquignaz and later his assistant photographic assistant Emile Bota.

According to Charles Fay, writing in the 1893 AMC Bulletin, Vittorio Sella was born in the Piedmont Region of Biella, northern Italy in 1859, in sight of the outliers of the Alps. His father, Venanzio Guiseppe Sella, was a woolen manufacturer who ran textile mills called Lanificio Maurzio Sella, which had been in the family for hundreds of years. The son seems to have inherited his father's versatility, for Venanzio Sella not only authored a standard work on woolen manufacture, but also published a treatise in 1856 on the then-new art of photography, which was translated into German and French and incorporated in Roret's Encyclopedic.

Sella's uncle, Quintino Sella, was a famous Italian minister of finance and founder of the Italian Alpine Club. It was he who taught the boy to love the mountains by taking the fifteen-year-old Sella on his first ascent in 1874, followed by another a year later.

In 1877 Sella left school to serve in the Italian army, and then returned to Biella to carry on the family business since his father had died in 1876. Every holiday, summer and winter, Sella was in the nearby mountains, often carrying an old photographic apparatus that had belonged to his father. By 1879, the twenty-year-old Sella had become an accomplished photographer who had mastered the collodion wet plate process and learned to develop mammoth glass plates on site, even in harsh weather conditions. He also began working with dry plates around this time.

Sella became famous among climbing fraternities as far away as London for his 1882 winter crossing of the Matterhorn when he ascended on one side and descended another. The speed of his campaigns was astonishing. In 1887 between July 29 and August 11 he climbed the Weisshorn twice, the Mettelhorn, Mittelgabelhorn, Alphubel, Rimpfischhorn, Dent Blanche, and the Dufourspitze of Monte Rosa. In 1889 and 1890 he made the first of two self-financed excursions to the Caucasus (AMC Bulletin Vol. VII, 1893-1895).

1. 139 Very Good: Minor abrasions, minor wear, corner wear and edge wear. Mount has edge and corner wear, missing corners and pieces, dirt and marks and is fragile.
2. 128 Excellent: Good: Minor abrasions, silvering edges, minor wear, corner wear and edge wear. Mount has edge and corner wear.