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The creation of the book The Butterflies of North America by William H. Edwards is traced in detail. Much new information is presented, derived mostly from Edwards' extensive correspondence. It was issued from 1868 to 1897 in three series (volumes) of 42 separate parts. The first volume was published by the American Entomological Society, while the second and third volumes were published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company under several different names. The 152 hand-colored lithographic plates were drawn by five artists: Shelly W. Denton, Edward A. Ketterer, Mary Peart, Daniel Wiest, and an unidentified artist under the supervision of John Cassin. Most of the resulting prints were colored by sisters Lavinia (Lydia) Bowen and Patience D. Leslie, though many additional colorists were involved. Four plates were replaced after publication; the originals and their replacements are figured together for the first time. The first volume included a synopsis of species, which Edwards intended to revise in the second volume, but abandoned in favor of a simple list of taxa. Severe monetary constraints forced Edwards to sell his butterfly collection to help finance the third volume. Complete copies of the first and second volumes were assembled and sold for many years. Revised citations are proposed for each volume and their associated publications. New biographical information about Mary Peart is provided, including her portrait.

From the spread of Renaissance humanist ideas and expansion of universities to the Reformation and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, the impact of the printing press on Western society ...

This paper explores the emergence of art education in the USA in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the issue of colour perception, it traces the aesthetic tropes shared between discussions of educating students' colour sensibilities and the concurrent clinical and literary experiments with synaesthesia. It then makes the case that early twentieth-century works of ‘visual music’ often combine the notion of synaesthesia with a pedagogical impulse to uplift the senses of the viewer. The paper thus follows two parallel trends in the nineteenth century (art education and experiments with synaesthesia) that converge in the twentieth century. This multi-threaded history is crucial for understanding the ways in which the sensual effects of colour were theorized and promoted in popular and modernist media – from the cinema to abstract painting – at the turn of the last century.

Briana B. Simmons The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (EOC) has produced iconographic religious painting since the sixth century ce, but with the onset of mechanical reproduction and faster printing technologies, worshippers now have access to new types of religious images.1 Today, foreign and locally produced chromolithographic images (or color prints) depicting Christian religious figures are readily available in Ethiopia and have become one of the most popular and prevalent art forms in the country. This is due in part to their high volume but also to their variety, malleability, and relatively low price, which places them into a category of decorative and ritually important objects that most Orthodox Ethiopians desire. Images such as Figure 1, of the Virgin and Child, generally depict Biblical figures that are copied from historical Western paintings or drawings. This research note outlines how Ethiopian Orthodox Christians use these religious images and briefly addresses their effect on the construction of an Orthodox identity.2 I will also discuss how church-trained painters have responded to these images and what the influx of chromolithographs has meant for their business. These reproduced images are part of a continual process of adaptation and change in the religious practices of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Rather than dismissing them as kitsch or artistic degeneration, this study examines how they are used as aesthetic objects and the value they hold for the Christian faithful. For this note, “chromolithograph” refers to any color print displayed in Ethiopia that is mechanically produced in Ethiopia or abroad. This comprehensive definition includes a number of printing technologies, ranging from traditional chromolithography to more modern photo offset printing processes. The prints can be purchased for one or two birr, which is approximately 10 to 20 US cents, and they are sold on sidewalks, especially outside Ethiopian Orthodox churches. Vendors often set up open-air stalls to exhibit the images, sometimes using upturned umbrellas to easily display numerous prints. It is common for peddlers to traverse local neighborhoods on foot carrying large stacks of images for sale. The prints range in size from small, 3" x 4" cards to large posters that are several feet across.3 Several scholars have examined the use of religious and secular chromolithographs in other countries (Jain 2007, Cosentino 2005, Pinney 1997, 2004, Rush 1999), but only one general overview of chromolithograph use in Ethiopia exists (Silverman, in All photos Are by the Author

Combining images and text, marquillas cigarreras, the illustrated cigarette packaging produced in Cuba during the second half of the nineteenth century, depict a wide range of themes, including picaresque scenes of everyday life in Havana. These scenes adroitly map out the conditions of Cubanidad, or Cuban-ness. Although Cuba remained a Spanish colony until the War of Independence at the close of the nineteenth century, throughout the century Cuban nationalist sentiment rose, and cultural as well as industrial production was increasingly identified as a sign of Cuban, not Spanish provenance. Marquillas brought together the quintessentially Cuban natural resource, tobacco, and the state-of-the-art print technology, chromolithography, in a commodity that symbolically and materially represented the modern nation coming into being. In this article, I look at marquillas as sites for the production and dissemination of national identity. Particularly relevant to this are marquillas that depict scenes o...

Research in sacral wall pictures of mass production in Lithuania is a new topic that so far has been barely examined in lithuanian historiography. This study starts investigating the topic by defining the research field and presenting the same occurences from Germany, France and Lithuania. There is represented spread of this phenomenon, technique, publishing centres and the most popular iconography founded on foreign and Lithuanian historiography as well the analysis of the collection of A. Petrauskas museum.

The economic news of the 1980s was that Japan had begun to conquer America. The Aesthetic news of the 1880s was identical. This article will examine the use of Japanese design concepts, Japanese imagery, and references to Japan itself on American trade cards from 1875 to 1890. It is concerned with a now obsolete form of advertising-the trade card-and the use of visual references to a then unfamiliar and exotic culture in promoting products and services both nationally and locally.1 "From 1873 to 1898 excess capacity in the American economy was chronic and it afflicted virtually every industry...excess capacity to mill flour, to make watches, to manufacture stoves" (Ginger 55, 57). This was a period of declining prices, with major economic depressions in the years 1873-76, 1884, and 1893-97. During 1870s, with overproduction widespread, the goal of advertising began to change "from an emphasis on providing information to an attempt to influence buyers by any means possible" (Strasser 91). The trade card was the preferred method for obtaining publicity and generating good will from the time into the 1890s. Trade cards of the later nineteenth century are individual advertisements produced on lightweight card stock, ranging in size from about the dimensions of a modern business card to approximately those of a postcard. They are almost invariably illustrated, usually by chromolithography, on one side only. The verso, and often a space on the recto as well, was left blank for the user to have this own text added by letterpress or rubber stamp. Trade cards were produced in prodigious numbers, made possible by steam powered presses, and were intended for free distribution to the general public by merchants and manufacturers, in much the same way that bookshops give away bookmarks or restaurants offer free matches today. Because they were colorful and attractive they were collected and preserved-commonly in albums-and hundreds of thou- sands have survived, making this study possible. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, manufacturers frequently offered their products without a developed advertising plan or definable set of marketing principles. They were only beginning to see the advantages of brand names, trademarks, and visual identities for their goods. An estimated 98 percent of all trade cards are of the "stock" variety-i.e., not custom-designed for the individual user-and thus the product or service advertised often has no relationship to the image on the card (Dilg: 1). An 1889 advertising manual recommended that "when ordering in quantities exceeding twenty thousand, little additional expense will permit the chromo being specially designed; but unless a very large number be desired, the so-called stock chromos will, considering the price, do as well" (Fowler, About Advertising and Printing 103).2 Trade cards are often unsigned by the lithographing companies that produced them, and their artists or designers are almost never identified (for an exception see Fig. 1).3 The cards were issued by lithographers both famous and obscure, as single or series designs (Fig. 2), and were usually sold to advertisers through agents or middlemen, including printers and stationery stores. They were even offered directly to collectors, who sometimes referred to them as picture cards. The use of trade cards declined markedly during the 1890s, their importance as an advertising medium eclipsed by the mass circulation magazines (Strasser 165; Jay 99-101). Fowler's Publicity, a one thousand page text on advertising produced in 1899, discusses everything from newspapers and periodicals to billboards and fence painting to samples and hand-bills, but makes no mention of the trade card. Its author, who commenced his career "at the beginning of art in commercial lithography," noted that by the late 1890s lithography was "almost exclusively confined to advertising [via posters] and illustrating the higher grade of books. …

W. D. Richmond's The Grammar of Lithography (1878) is a comprehensive and instructive work on the many varieties of lithography - with all their attendant materials and instruments - described and explained in practical terms for the active participant and the amateur enthusiast alike. Richmond's Grammar should also be understood as part of a wider movement of nineteenth-century industrial disclosure, where pockets of masterly knowledge previously available to apprentices and company employees alone were being made much more widely available through impartial manuals and guides. This noble cause was intended to bring down the walls of ignorance and trade secrecy and to foster an open atmosphere of mutual understanding. In the realm of lithography, Richmond's Grammar was the first treatise to achieve this. While the work forgoes any historical or overly theoretical discussion, it does provide an excellent example of practically oriented expertise in the graphic arts.

Review of: "Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste," by Joni L. Kinsey.