Author Archives: Julie Mellby

Government hope and despair, Impeachment stays in the hat, 1802


James Gillray (1756-1815), Hope, April 8, 1802. Hand colored etching with aquatint. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.01263. Gift of Dickson Q. Brown, Princeton University Class of 1895.

Interior view seen in full below:


James Gillray (1756-1815), Sketch of the interior of St Stephens, as it now stands, March 1802. Hand colored etching with aquatint. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.01468. Gift of Dickson Q. Brown, Princeton University Class of 1895.

Companion print below:

James Gillray (1756-1815), Despair, April 8, 1802. Hand colored etching with aquatint. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.01252. Gift of Dickson Q. Brown, Princeton University Class of 1895.

Impeachment remains in the hat along with ministerial tricks, plunders, blunders, and other misdemeanors.

In the first print, fat MP William Dickinson (active 1796-1802) stands outside the door of the House of Commons, where Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth (1757-1844) is speaking. Dickinson mumbles, “let me see – 25 Millions! how are we Ruin’d? – 10 pr Cent for my Money! – income tax taken off! – well! – well! – well! – .”

On April 2, 1802, Dickinson seconded the Clergy Non-Residence Bill and on April 4, in the companion print, Richard Bateman Robson (active 1802) announced that the finances of the Government were desperate and that it could not pay its bills. He says “We’re all ruinated, Sir! – all diddled, Sir!! – abus’d by Placemen, Sir!!! – Bankrupts all, Sir! – not worth Sixteen Pounds, Ten Shillings, Sir! ”

In his coat are papers, “Ignorance of ye Old Administration; Stupidity of ye New Administration; Charges against the Ministry”. In his hat, “Ministerial Tricks, Plunders, Blunders, Collusion; Impeach[ment]; Punishm[ent].

On April 5, Henry Addington made a dramatic budget speech (in his hand is a paper inscribed: 25 Mill. Loan) announcing a loan of £25,000,000. He successfully abolishes Pitt’s income tax, although it is reintroduced by Addington in 1803.

–Mark Lucas, The Consequences of Honour (2013).

Le Plutarque français


Édouard Mennechet, editor, Le Plutarque français: vies des hommes et des femmes illustres de la France, depuis le cinquième siècle jusqu’a nos jours, avec leurs portraits en pied gravés sur acier, [=The French Plutarch: lives of illustrious men and women of France, from the fifth century to the present day, with their full-length portraits engraved on steel] ([Paris, 18??]). Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2004-1041Q

The Graphic Arts Collection holds 35 separate parts from different volumes of Le Plutarque français. Each has the hand colored steel engraving laid in mid-volume, rather than a frontispiece. The men and women profiled are: Georges, cardinal d’Amboise. — Louis XII. — Bayard. — François Rabelais. — Marguerite de Valois. — Le cardinal du Bellay. — Anne de Montmorenci. — François Ier. — Clément Marot. — Cossé-Brissac. — Michel de l’Hospital. — Ambroise Paré. — Jacques Amyot. — Gaspard de Coligny. — François de Guise. — Catherine de Medicis. — Ronsard. — Brantôme. — Louis Ier de Bourbon. — Etienne Jodelle. — Montaigne. — Crillon. — Marie Stuart. — Lesdiguières. — Le duc de Guise. — Philippe de Mornay. — Henri IV. — de Thou. — de Malherbe. — Sully. — Bassompierre. — Mathieu Molé. — Jean le Clerc. — Guez de Balzac. — Gondi.

A complete table of contents for Le Plutarque français, as well as an index to the painters and engravers can be found in the 1838 edition available through google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=VUU7AQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22%C3%89douard+Mennechet%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit573r78HmAhUwhOAKHUftArEQ6AEwAnoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q&f=false. Here are a few more plates.


 

 

 

What Did George Washington Really Look Like?

George Washington portrait collection GC046 Box 1-6 Graphic Arts Collection

 

Winsor & Newton watercolor paintbox

Gambose; raw sienna; yellow ocher; chro.yel.pale; chro.yel.deep; burnt sienna // vermilion; light red; chimson lake; purple lake; new blue; prussian blue // emerald green; hooker’s grn.2; brown pink; neutral tint; burnt umber; lamp black

What is Gambose? It’s a bright mustard yellow, with a great story attached to it: https://www.theawl.com/2017/11/gamboge-a-sunny-yellow-with-a-deadly-past/

Read the story of Hooker’s Green: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/03/hookers-green-the-color-of-apple-trees-and-envy/

What is a Lake color? A lake pigment is an insoluble material that colors by dispersion. Lakes are basically a pigment which has been manufactured from a dye by precipitating a soluble dye with a metallic salt. The resulting pigment is called a lake pigment. These are often used to color food.

What is New Blue? This is Ultramarine blue, also sold as French blue, Gmelin’s blue (A synthetic ultramarine blue first manufactured by Christian Gmelin in Germany in 1828), Royal blue and New blue. Different brand-names offer different strengths, degree of grinding, and consequently, differences in tinting power.


If you find the hidden pin and remove it, a secret bottom drawer can be opened and used to hold all your personal color recipes.

Max Ernst and the Gallant Sheep



Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), La brebis galante [The Gallant Sheep] (Paris: Editions premières, 1949). Graphic Arts GAX 2019- in process.
***Note this was a collaboration, not illustrations as after thought.***

Cet ouvrage, le premier de la collection GBMZ … a été achevé d’imprimer … le douze novembre mil neuf cent quarante-neuf … Il a été tiré trois cent seize exemplaires … Un exemplaire unique sur vieux Japon … Quinze exemplaires sur Vélin Montval … Trois cents exemplaires sur Grand Vélin d’Arches, numéroté de 1 à 300 et comportant trois eaux-fortes originales. Il a été tiré en outre cinq exemplaires nominatifs sur Vélin Montval …”–Page [2]. =This work, the first in the GBMZ collection … was finished printing … on November 12, 1949 … 316 copies were printed … A single copy on old Japan … 15 copies on Vélin Montval … 300 copies on Grand Vélin d’Arches, numbered from 1 to 300 and containing 3 original etchings. Five nominative copies were also printed on Vélin Montval … “–Page 2.

Beyond the three ‘original’ etchings, 18 of the relief line block illustrations are pochoir colored in striking yellows, greens, reds, oranges, and blues.

M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (University of Texas Press,  2013)

Sadness is a Bird


The Fine Press Book Association co-sponsors two book fairs: the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair and the Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair. The Oxford event is biennial and at the March 2018 fair, the Judges’ Choice Awards went to three fine press editions.

One of the winners was Elies Plana, Barcelona, for an edition of the poem Neijmantototsintle by Ateri Miyawatl, with linocuts by Francisco Villa, editioned and printed by Plana. Originally written in Nahuatl in 2016, the poem has been translated into Catalan and English.

https://fpba.com/2018/03/prize-winners-announced-at-fpba-oxford-book-fair/

The Nahua actress/poet Ateri Miyawatl was born in Acatlán, Chilapa, Guerrro and graduated from the Michoacana University of San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH). Together with Celeste Jaime and Mara Rahab Bautista, she directs Originaria, a project that aims to show women poets who express themselves in native languages.

Here is a rough translation of her biographical statement: Ateri Miyawatl is the name that my parents gave me and with which my community knows me, it is also the name with which I identify. Ateri is a Purépecha word and Miyawatl a Nahuatl word. The day I was born my father gilded his brown back in the sun on the beaches of Jalisco selling hammocks to tourists. My mother decided that she would give birth in the town’s bajareque clinic, where Nahuales and wholesale atlapixques were born. That morning, when I came out of my mother’s body, I slipped from the hands of the apprentice nurse, with my head toward the floor. What happened next, just before hitting me on the ground, I leave to the imagination.

Anna Gatica, is the name with which my parents registered me in the Civil Registry. They have never named me that. As Anna, I studied theater and Cultural Management. My lines of research and creative execution are developed with native peoples, with themes and in peripheral geographies. My actress training is complemented by performance studies, audiovisual media, Cultural Management, Gender Equality and Indigenous Rights. I have collaborated with various artists, non-governmental organizations and civil associations in Mexico, the United States and South America.

See her in this video, discussing Originaria.

 

“De los factores que identifico,” noted Miyawatl, “uno es el poder sobresalir respecto a los compañeros varones, respecto a las compañeras que se dedican a hacer poesía en estas lenguas. …Otro factor importante es la barrera del lenguaje, muchas mujeres llegamos a las escuelas a estudiar y todo se encuentra en español, es como si ustedes llegarán a estudiar su carrera y todo lo encontrarán en italiano, no existe un apoyo para las personas que hablamos otra lengua.”

 

Ateri Miyawatl, Neijmantototsintle = La tristesa és un ocell = Sadness is a bird. Illustrations by Francisco Villa ([Barcelona, Spain] : Elies Plana, 2018. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

Loew’s Jersey “Wonder” Theater

https://loewsjersey.org/

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The Loew’s Jersey opened on September 28, 1929, as the fourth of the five Loew’s Wonder Theaters, just two weeks after the Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx and the Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn. All five would have opened earlier but in October 1927, the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was released and all the Wonder theaters under construction had to be refitted for sound.

Meant to be a movie palace with “opulence unbound,” in fact the gilding throughout the lobby was actually painted aluminum and the marble columns are scagliola, a technique for producing faux marble. So much for movie magic.

The exterior has a muted terra cotta façade and standard marquee but at one time, the tower’s Saint George and the dragon was animated so that, when the clock chimed every fifteen minutes, red bulbs in the dragon’s mouth would light up and Saint George would lunge at the dragon.

According to the New York Times, “Reports of the theater opening describe an eight-foot, 150-year-old French Buhl clock, Dresden porcelain vases from the Vanderbilt mansion, bronze statues from France, crimson curtains embroidered with gold griffins and a turquoise-tiled Carrera marble fountain filled with goldfish.” Creating even more of a spectacle, guests were serenaded by live piano music or a string quartet coming from the musicians’ salon, the gallery above the entrance.”


The interior of Loew’s Jersey has appeared in several films, including Last Days of Disco and just this year Apple TV’s Dickinson, season 2, used the theater as a 19th-century opera house.

 

Located across from the PATH station in Journal Square, the theater was closed in 1987 and the building was slated for demolition when local residents banded together to save the historic theater. They collected 10,000 petition signatures and attended countless City Council meetings, and finally, in 1993, the city agreed to buy the theater for $325,000 and allow the newly formed Friends of the Loew’s to operate there as a nonprofit arts and entertainment center and embark on a restoration effort.

This fireplace is in the men’s room off the balcony. The Lady’s room has a separate lounge area and a third room for checking your make up.

 

 Read about all five wonder theaters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loew%27s_Wonder_Theatres
 

 

…in that Empire

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired the collectors edition of “…In That Empire housed in a sepele wood box in an edition of eight. All sixty-one directional positions are stamped into the top of the lid and each interior compartment is velvet lined with its own cover. Archival, inkjet prints of each turn live comfortably in their respective niches. A vellum reproduction of “On Exactitude in Science” by Borges, with Siegel and Smith’s markings, sits atop each stack of photos. Velvet tabs help ease the photos out for viewing and the bottom of the box is lined with felt for safe display on any surface”.

. . In that Empire is a conversation, an experimental cartography bound by each initial decision. Jorge Luis Borges’ story “On Exactitude in Science” frames the encounter. Both artists’ bodies move in space, simultaneously and an image is snapped at each turn, marking their presence. Each “L” and “R” in order of appearance creates a list of sixty-one positions. The images collapse atop one another, each resting its weight on the other’s back. In this empire, the bodies chart the arbitrariness of turns.

The companion 144-page publication includes sixty-one photos by each artist taken in West Newbury, Massachusetts and Harlem, New York. The reader is invited to access the book through multiple entry points, from front to back, in any order. No matter the beginning, a turn of the page becomes an act of continuing the conversation of experimental cartography established in the making of this book.

 

Cal Siegel & Sable Elyse Smith, … In that Empire (Pacific, 2019). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

Page through the bound volume here: https://www.pacificpacific.pub/products/in-that-empire-1

Monsieur Francois introduces Master Pr***tly to the National Assembly

Johann J. Beecher believed in a substance called phlogiston. When a substance is burned, phlogiston was supposedly added from the air to the flame of the burning object. In some substances, a product is produced. For example, calx of mercury plus phlogiston gives the product of mercury.

Joseph Priestley heated calx of mercury, collected the colorless gas and burned different substances in this colorless gas. Priestley called the gas “dephlogisticated air” but it was actually oxygen. It was Antoine Lavoisier who disproved the Phlogiston Theory. He renamed the “dephlogisticated air” oxygen when he realized that the oxygen was the part of air that combines with substances as they burn. Because of Lavoisier’s work, Lavoisier is now called the “Father of Modern Chemistry”.–http://www.columbia.edu/itc/chemistry/chem-c2507/navbar/chemhist.html

James Sayers (1748-1823), Monsieur Francois introduces Master Pr…tly to the National Assembly, June 18, 1792. Etching. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process.

In July 1791, while living in Birmingham, Dr Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and his friends arranged to have a celebratory dinner on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. British rioters gathered outside the hotel and attacked attendees as they left. Priestley and his wife escaped but their home was burned down and their possession destroyed. The Priestleys eventually settled in Hackney, where he gave a series of lectures on history and natural philosophy. Read more: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/methods1/priestley1/priestley.html

 

Multiple British caricatures were published against Priestley, making life in England became more and more difficult. On June 8, 1792, his son William was presented to the French Assembly and granted letters of naturalization. Dr. Priestley was granted French citizenship in August and in September, elected to the French National Convention although he declined the position. Ultimately, he and his family left England for the United States.

Sayers’s print is set inside the hall of the French National Assembly, whose members are depicted with animal heads. On the top left Nicolas Louis François de Neufchâteau (1750-1828) pulls the strings attached to William Priestley as he is presented to the Assembly. Young Priestley holds an electrical rod to shock the Assembly members sending sparks into a jar inscribed “Phlogiston from Hackney College.”

For more about Priestley and dephlogisticated air, see: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/josephpriestleyoxygen.html

Visit Priestley House in Northumberland, PA: http://www.josephpriestleyhouse.org/

 

See also James Gillray, A Birmingham toast, as given on the 14th of July, by the Revolution Society, 1791. Dr. Priestley seen standing to give the toast.

The Petersburg Press

[Publications from the Petersburg Press]. London / New York / Milan, 1968–1976. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

The master printers of the Petersburg Press worked with many of the best artists of the 1960s and 1970s, including Patrick Caulfield, Gene Davis, Richard Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Henry Moore, Ed Moses, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Mark Tobey, William Tucker and John Walker. All of these artists are including in our recently acquired reference binder, with cataloguing and documentation for their projects published by Press.

Was this an in-house index or a collector’s bibliography? We don’t know for sure. Founded in London in 1968, with a New York branch opening in 1972, the core activity of the Press was collaboration with artists to publish limited edition prints and livres d’artistes. The Press was a continuation of the collaborative publishing initiated by Paul Cornwall-Jones on the founding of Editions Alecto (EA) in 1961 as a post-graduate at the architectural schools at Cambridge University.

Housed in blue binder (31 x 23 cm.), this small volume features catalogue entries on 66 leaves, inserted loose into plastic sleeves. The alphabetically-organized entries provide details on the works, including title, date, medium, edition size, dimensions, and sometimes prices, with each work illustrated with an accompanying photograph. The majority of the entries appearing on the letterhead of the Petersburg Press.


Here’s an inventory, alphabetical by name: /Petersburg Press Inventory“