UPCOMING CONFERENCE - 2010

Historical Prints—
Fact and Fiction

November 12-13, 2010
Worcester, Massachusetts

Keynote Address:
"History Prints for the Parlor"
by Mark Thistlethwaite, Kay and Velma Kimbell Chair of Art History, Texas Christian University,

Council Room Presentation:
"Beauties of America: The True Creation, Publication, and Distribution of Historical Imagery of American Cities by Staffordshire Potter John Ridgway, 1822"
by Ruth Ann Penka

Register for the conference online


~ Panels ~

Creating an American Identity

  • Nancy Siegel, Associate Professor of Art History, Towson University, "Savage Conflict: The 'Indian Princess' as Aggressor and Aggrieved in 18th-Century Prints"

    By the mid-eighteenth century, in response to increasing political tensions between American colonists and the British government, British print and medal makers added the "Indian Princess" to their stable of satirical images. This paper examines the gender and power struggles associated with her appearance as a symbol of America. In a series of pro-colonial prints and paper designs for small production medals, the Indian Princess is variously depicted as the aggressor or the aggrieved. At times strong and aggressive, often half-naked, and engaged in physical battles with Britannia she became a personification of the colonists. struggle for independence. These prints were meant to be poignantly comical, further enhanced by the gendering of both America and Britannia as women—female warriors putting their dukes up against one another in a variety of engraved scenarios.

  • Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children's Books, American Antiquarian Society, "Where Bravery, History, and Fantasy Meet: Heroic Prints in Nineteenth-Century American Children's Books"

    • I propose to examine the development and visual treatment of fictional and heroic American heroic figures in pictorial children's books issued between Lafayette's triumphant return to the United States in 1824 and 1875, the eve of the American Centennial. Books such as engraver/author John Warner Barber's Historical Scenes in the United States (1827) and biographies of Gen. Lafayette and the American general Israel Putnam issued under one cover (1830) celebrate their heroes as historic actors on grand landscapes of miniature scale.

  • Weston Naef, Curator Emeritus, The Getty Museum, "Carleton Watkins and the Printed Picture in California: 1850-1880"

    • The discovery of gold in California in 1848 created an unprecedented demand for pictures that illustrated sites and their social context. Few other places in the world of this era are represented by such a voluminous historical iconography that includes drawings, engravings, and lithographs in the form of bird's eye views with marginal illustrations, pictorial letter sheets and maps, many of which were dependent on photographs as sources for the engravers. This talk will present new findings on Carleton Watkins' role as a maker of the source images for engravers starting in the daguerreian era and continuing to the advent of photomechanical methods around 1880. The mystery of why some engravings after photographs were credited to a maker and other were not will be explored through lively comparisons.

Consumption of Historical Prints

  • Allison Stagg, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, University of London, "'The first will grumble and the last will laugh:' An American Audience for British Visual Humor, 1790-1810"

    British visual satire published during the reign of King George has been termed by scholars as "the golden age of caricature." British political and royal figures, as well as domestic gossip, provided enviable opportunities for caricaturists to visually mock, often resulting in a situation or a subject being represented numerous times by different artists. This paper will take a different approach to these caricatures, focusing on how contemporary American audiences came to see such specific representations of British visual humor. Between 1790 and 1810, there was a strong interest in America for British social caricatures, and recent evidence has also found an audience for British political caricatures. Central to my thesis will be the efforts of the Philadelphia based printer, William Cobbett and the New Hampshire bookseller, Charles Peirce. Both men imported British caricatures and provided venues for Americans to view, purchase, and even rent impressions of visual humor.

  • Aimee E. Newell, Director of Collections, National Heritage Museum, "Educational Exercise, Decoration or Symbol of Brotherhood? The Use of Historical Prints in Early American Masonic Lodges"

    A 1796 inventory of the furnishings of Union Lodge, a Masonic lodge in Dorchester, Massachusetts, lists the Front View of the Temple of Solomon. This print dates to the 1720s and depicts the temple as it is described in the Bible. The engraving offered particular appeal to Freemasons; their rituals are based, in part, on the story of the Temple's construction. Piecing together evidence about the use of historical prints in the lodge — prints with a provenance from a specific lodge, illustrations showing lodge rooms and their decoration, and lodge inventories, for example — offers the opportunity to learn more about how historical prints were marketed and used in American society during the Revolutionary and federal eras.

  • Corey Piper, Curatorial Assistant for the Mellon Collections, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, "A Fair Field and No Favor: The Visualization of American Idealism through Currier & Ives Harness Racing Prints"

    Decades before stars like Babe Ruth helped to enthrone baseball as America's national pastime, nineteenth-century Americans were united in their fervent passion for the pursuit that rightly can be called the country's first truly national sport—harness racing. The sport of harness racing, which developed from humble beginnings among amateur enthusiasts and breeders, would by the second half of the nineteenth century become the most popular spectator sport in the United States, even eclipsing thoroughbred racing. The rise of harness racing was both recorded and spurred by the lithographers Currier and Ives, who devoted as much as ten percent of their total output to images of the sport. The thesis of my research is that harness racing coincided perfectly with Currier and Ives populist vision of the Republic, rooted in the belief in what were held to be traditional American values such as patriotism and love of country, the moral benefit of hard work (especially agricultural work) and the belief in the merits of majority rule. This paper will examine how both the sport's promoters and the artists employed the printed image to deliberately craft a history and mythology that championed the particular characteristics of the sport that both conformed to and confirmed the primacy of those larger ideals.

Prints for a Cause

  • Carl Robert Keyes, Assistant Professor of History, Assumption College, "Marketing the New Nation: Patriotic Imperatives in Advertisements for Early American Prints"

    In the final decades of the eighteenth century, a new industry arose as artists, artisans, authors, and others created and sold memorabilia (including prints, medals, maps, books, and pottery) that commemorated the revolution and its heroes. In so doing, they participated in a process of national unification already underway, a process that emphasized veneration of patriot leaders and notable events. Many artists, engravers, and publishers began as early as the 1770s and 1780s to produce and sell prints and other commemorative objects that could be displayed in consumers. homes and workplaces. Advertisers marketed these items by encouraging the American public to construct a common history and nationalistic identifications through the purchase of prints as well as other memorabilia.

  • Jeffrey Croteau, Manager of Library & Archives, National Heritage Museum, "From Blind Man's Bluff to the Poor Blind Candidate: David Claypoole Johnston's Anti-Masonic Woodcuts for New England Almanacs"

    American illustrator David Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865) is best remembered for his satirical political cartoons. Among the most barbed of these cartoons are a number that take aim at Andrew Jackson. At the same time, Johnston published a group of lesser-known anti-Masonic woodcuts for almanacs printed in New England in the late 1820s and early 1830s, which have yet to be seriously addressed by scholars. Johnston's anti-Masonic prints are masterful satires which also demonstrate the difficulty that may be encountered today by viewers attempting to .read. Masonic and anti-Masonic prints. This paper proposes to look at the anti-Masonic prints of David Claypoole Johnston in the context of the politics of the time as well as with a view toward understanding how Johnston used illustrations of Masonic symbols and ritual in constructing politically-motivated satire. It argues that a closer, contextualized reading of these historical prints may reveal more about the particular political climate from which they emerged.

  • Kimberly Curtiss, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, Rutgers University, "Osceola and the Abolitionist Prints"

    Following his capture and untimely death in 1838, the Seminole war leader Osceola became widely regarded by Americans as an Indian martyr. He also became the most frequently depicted American Indian of his time. Lithographs of Osceola were produced in various contexts: as a frontispiece to James Birchett Ransom's 1838 account of the famous chief's life; as a twenty by twenty-six inch print sold to the public for a dollar fifty by George Catlin in the same year; and as an illustration in the 1838 edition to McKenney and Hall's exhaustive History of the Indian Tribes of North America. Yet no other image of Osceola had more lasting political impact than an image published in The American Anti-Slavery Almanac of 1839 depicting the legendary kidnapping of Osceola's black wife. It is this unusual abolitionist print of a mythic event that this paper takes as its subject.

Artistic License in Art and Literature

  • Erika Piola, Assistant Curator, Prints and Photographs, Library Company of Philadelphia, "Great and Terrible: Lithographs of Public Celebrations and Tragedies in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia"

    Before the internet, television, and the news photograph, lithographs provided the citizens of Philadelphia with their "first" glimpse of local celebrations, exhibitions, and tragedies reported by the city's press. "Great and Terrible: Lithographs of Public Celebrations and Tragedies in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia" examines the importance of this genre of popular print in analyzing the visual culture that influenced and was created by depictions of public and newsworthy events. Parades, society fêtes, and major fires, explosions and railroad accidents in the Philadelphia area between the 1830s and 1860s provide the subject matter to analyze these overlooked graphic works of popular culture. Referring to the work of Beatrice Farwell, Joshua Brown, and Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, the paper presents overviews of the depicted celebrations and tragedies as well as compares available written accounts of the events to the published lithographs to explore the extent of the artistic license employed. The conception and accuracy of the imagery is analyzed, and the process of how an artist received information about an event and the professional networks he utilized to disseminate the prints are explored.

  • Anne Roth-Reinhardt, Ph.D. Candidate, English, University of Minnesota, "Pirate of Patriot? Representations of John Paul Jones in Melville's Israel Potter"

    Melville's Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), appropriate to the literary bent of the nineteenth century, relies on Revolutionary history and the Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824) for its source material. Advertising himself as editor rather than author, Melville vows fidelity to the biography of Potter, promising the narrative to be .a . tombstone retouched. rather than a fictive creation. Melville honors his contract with the reader for the first six chapters, faithfully .retouching. language and syntax without changing the character or adventure of Potter's first-person account. The material of the novel after chapter six, however, noticeably digresses from the original, fabricating conversation and fraternity between Israel, Ben Franklin, and John Paul Jones. Melville's composite of John Paul Jones in Israel Potter is the subject of my research. My presentation examines Melville's composite of Jones created through prints and portraits of the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and considers the implication of the caricature to a nation remembering revolution, supporting Indian removal, and facing potential dissolution.

  • Katherine E. Manthorne, Professor of Modern Art of the Americas, Graduate Center, City University of New York, "Eliza Pratt Greatorex's Re-Construction of Old New York (1875)"

    The realist landscape painter Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) returned from Paris in Spring 1863 and looked with fresh eyes at New York City, which she had adopted as her home after emigrating from Ireland in 1840. She took pleasure in a number of old churches, hospitals, and especially homes that had survived in some cases since the Revolutionary era: not a long time by European standards, but old for America. Shortly thereafter, with the end of the Civil War and the booming post-war economy, all that began to change. Her daily walks revealed increasingly alarming evidence of the destruction of many of the hallowed structures to make room for modern offices, shops, and roads. So she re-invented herself as an artist, transitioning from landscape to the urban environment, and from oil painting to graphics. She preserved the appearance of the historic landmarks and eventually published more than 100 images in a folio volume entitled Old New York. From the Battery to Bloomingdale (1875), accompanied by a text authored by her sister Matilda Pratt Despard. The artist confessed her struggle to capture both the "true appearance" of a given building and its historic spirit, the atmosphere that existed when it was first built and thrived.

Europe and America

  • Christopher N. Phillips, Assistant Professor, English, Lafayette College, "How Benjamin West's Prints Made Art Epic"

    Art historians have often quoted or applied the term "epic" in reference to stirring, large-scale works: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel mural, Eakins' The Gross Clinic, Cole's The Course of Empire. But what have critics meant by the term, and how did it participate in process of making (and un-making) reputations and canons? This paper explores these questions through the case study of several Benjamin West prints, works which came to have importance as markers of epic style. The second rise of West's career, following his ouster as P.R.A. in 1805, is the focus of this study. After decades of work on an elaborate commission for George III's projected new chapel at Windsor, West found himself left with dozens of unfinished or unaccepted paintings after George withdrew the commission in 1801; political intrigues in the Royal Academy led to his removal from the Royal Academy's presidency in 1805, but the death of Lord Horatio Nelson gave West the chance to reclaim his preeminence among British history painters.

  • Daniel C. Lewis, Dean of Communications and Humanities, Northern Virginia Community College, "Printmaker Goupil, Leutze's Washington the Delaware, and the Prints that Made it a National Icon in Nineteenth-Century America"

    I examine the role French print publisher Goupil and Company played in popularizing Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) in the decade leading up to the Civil War. By 1861 prints after the artist's work were appearing in history textbooks, U.S. histories, and biographies on Washington. Historians and their publishers created new interpretations of the historical picture in the prints they published.appropriations that can help us understand why Washington Crossing became a national icon before the Union was shattered by the Civil War. The Parisian print publisher was zealous in its efforts to secure a commission with the highly regarded painter. The firm purchased the work from Leutze and arranged for the artist to paint a small replica for engraving. Goupil assigned one of its finest engravers, Paul Girardet, to create a large ornate line engraving, which was completed in 1853. Goupil developed an ambitious marketing strategy to compel the elite and middle class in the United States to buy the high quality print.

  • Marie-Stephanie Delamaire, Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, Columbia University, "'What are you going to do about it?': Thomas Nast's Reproduction of History Painting in his Early Political Cartoons"

    This paper analyzes Thomas Nast's appropriation of famous European reproductive prints in his political cartoons of the Reconstruction era. I argue that Nast defined the language and function of American cartoons as a transformation of European history painting into a mass-produced image designed to prompt the viewer's immediate political intervention. Nast's prolific career started as newspaper illustrator in the antebellum era for the growing illustrated press of the late 1850s in New York. During the Civil War, the artist elaborated a new style of large-scale cartoons that made extensive use of old masters. and contemporary history painting, in particular those whose reproductions were concurrently disseminated in print form by the American branch of Goupil & Co in New York. Nast's cartoons such as .Lincoln. or .The Tammany Tiger Loose. were built on Raphael, Rubens, and Jean-Léon Gérôme's visual vocabulary.

Presidents and Print Culture

  • Rachel E. Stephens, Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, University of Iowa, "Jackson in Print: Politics, Competition, and Propaganda in Presidential Printmaking"

    During his eight-years in office, Andrew Jackson became the first President to employ a full-time artist. Ralph E.W. Earl was an intimate of the Jackson inner circle and worked tirelessly throughout his life to promote Jackson's image in portraiture. In addition, Earl sought to promote Jackson through the printed image. He traveled to Jackson's home in Nashville, Tennessee in 1817 to paint Jackson's portrait as the basis for a print. After their initial sittings together, Earl began producing an endless supply of Jacksonian portraits that helped meet the high demand for Jackson's image after his heroics in the battle of New Orleans. Earl managed a printmaking enterprise of Jackson portraits in his lifetime, in addition to working tirelessly in other ways to promote the public image of his good friend. This paper will offer a brief overview of the history of Jacksonian prints, in addition to investigating the previously unacknowledged connection between Jackson and the Vanderlyn and Earl prints of 1828. A study of both prints within the larger context of Jacksonian printed material, as well as other Presidential prints, and the larger production of the portrait print in the nineteenth century, will shed light on the power of printmaking in nineteenth-century America, as well as offering an interesting comparative case-study.

  • Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, Princeton University, "Biddy Buchanan: the Vanity Fair Caricatures of President James Buchanan"

    This paper will address H. L. Stephens's caricatures of President James Buchanan published almost weekly in Vanity Fair magazine during Buchanan's last years in office. These farcical, even ridiculous visual satires led directly to our contemporary appreciation for Buchanan as one of the worst American presidents. James Buchanan, Jr. (1791-1868) served as the fifteenth President of the United States from 1857 to 1861. His mishandling of the crisis preceding the Civil War, along with exploitation and basic neglect of other national concerns, has led twenty-first-century historians to rank him among the worst (if not the worst) president in American history. It is one thing to make this assertion in retrospect but it was quite another for one of Buchanan's contemporaries to characterize the sitting president as a buffoon. And yet, this appears to be the objective of the newly established American weekly Vanity Fair. In its 1859 inaugural issue, Vanity Fair promised that politics would be "persistently intermeddled with" and politicians from around the world were caricatured during its three year run. Yet, it was Buchanan, during his presidency, who was its primary target.

  • Volker Depkat, Professor of American Studies, Universität Regensburg, "Representing Democratic Legitimacy and Authority in Founding Situations: An Asymmetric Comparison of the USA and Weimar Germany"

    Focusing on the genre of state portraits as the basis for prints, the paper will compare visual representations of the two American presidents George Washington (1732-1799) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) with similar portrayals of Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) and Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), the two presidents of the Weimar Republic. In looking at the periods from 1789 to 1865 on the side and the years from 1919 to 1933 on the other, I will pursue an asymmetrical historical comparison that aims at reaching a deeper understanding of the history of both democracies by looking at their critical founding periods in terms of how they solved the problem of visualizing legitimacy after a revolutionary break. The United States in the period of the Early Republic and Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s were both faced with the task of having to forge a visual culture supportive of a democratic consensus in a time when the visual household of political legitimacy and authority in both countries was still strongly shaped by monarchical and aristocratic traditions. In this context, the U.S. will be discussed as an example of a successful creation of a democratic political iconography, while the Weimar Republic will be interpreted as an example of a failed attempt to establish a political iconography creating and stabilizing a democratic consensus.

 

Keynote Address by Mark Thistlethwaite
Kay and Velma Kimbell Chair of Art History, Texas Christian University, History Prints for the Parlor

This talk considers prints of American historical subjects that graced domestic interiors in the antebellum years. Particular attention will be given to engraved images found in the popular and ubiquitous gift books of the era. Gift book prints are of special interest and significance because of the books. intimate nature (presents from, typically, men to women), their public aspect (being situated in parlors), and their didactic implications (women prepared children for citizenry). The examination of these images, along with independent prints found in the domestic sphere, contributes to a more expansive view of mid-nineteenth-century American print culture and its role in representing, identifying and perpetuating American history.

 

Council Room Presentation by Ruth Ann Penka
"Beauties of America: The True Creation, Publication, and Distribution of Historical Imagery of American Cities by Staffordshire Potter John Ridgway, 1822"

Ruth Penka will discuss the landscape imagery on the "Beauties of America," Staffordshire pottery manufactured by John and William Ridgway in England, derived from historic prints, many of which are found in the Society.s collections. This discussion will reveal how historical images of American cities were created, published and distributed to American consumers between the years 1790-1850. In search of new markets, especially after Great Britain.s defeat in the War of 1812, Staffordshire Potters located in the towns of Tunstall, Longport, Burslem, Cobridge, Hanley, Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, Fenton and Longton, began to transfer American imagery onto their pottery to develop a market in the United States. Commonly, American images were copied by Staffordshire engravers from English and American engravings and lithographs issued in books, magazines, portfolios, commercial directories or as separately published prints. Ms. Penka is currently cataloging the collection.

 

A generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation makes this program possible.

Register for the conference online. All registrations received after Friday, October 29, 2010, including walk-in registrations, incur a $10.00 late fee.


 

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