Category Archives: Medium

mediums

Wayang Kulit

The Graphic Arts Collection holds two Wayang Kulit, or Indonesian shadow puppets, thanks to the gift of Professor Robert Koch. They came with a small label that reads:

“A pair of Balinese shadow puppets, probably 20th century, with articulated arms, are part of a tradition of Oriental shadow theatres which began as illustrations to narration. The technique uses flat figures of a non-transparent or semi-transparent material to reflect stylized shadows against a screen; these are then moved to music or chant. The entertainment is a common diversion for the eve of a wedding.”

The Princeton Alumni Weekly posted this remembrance of Mr. Koch in 2012.

Robert Koch, professor emeritus of art at Princeton, died Nov. 10, 2011, after a lengthy illness. He was 91. In 1940 and 1942, Koch earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina. After Army service from 1942 to 1946, he earned an M.F.A. in 1949 and in 1954 a Ph.D. in art from Princeton. His career started at Princeton in 1948 as a teaching assistant, and in 1949 he became an instructor and assistant director of Princeton University Art Museum.

Koch was appointed an assistant professor of art in 1955 and in 1966 was promoted to full professor. He remained as assistant director of the art museum until 1962, and then was faculty curator of prints. He retired as professor emeritus in 1990. A scholar of Northern Renaissance art, Koch received a Fulbright grant in 1956 for study in Belgium, and in 1961 won a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. He authored several books.

As described in PAW’s June 2, 2010, article “When Art Historians Went to War,” more than a dozen Princetonians helped locate and return Nazi-confiscated art works for the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Service. Koch was one of these “Monuments Men,” the last surviving Princetonian among them.

Princeton Aviation Corps

SOME FACTS ABOUT SCHOOL OF MILITARY AERONAUTICS; Major Crissy Authorizes Publication of Interesting Details in Work of Flying Cadets.

“Although much of the available information concerning the School of Military Aeronautics, established in Princeton last summer, is not permitted to appear in print, Major Crissy, Commandant of the School, has authorized the publication of a few interesting facts. Nothing definite concerning the schedule for the different squadrons can be printed, but it is probable that a two hour period every afternoon will be devoted to supervised sports on a competitive basis for developing an Esprit dc Corps among the men.

Every man in the School is obliged to take instruction in trap-shooting for the purpose of developing co-ordination for aerial gunnery. It is understood that a lengthening of the course from eight to twelve weeks, in order to prepare the men more completely for their work, is now being contemplated by the authorities in Washington. The military subjects which are being taught in the school are, in general, Signalling and Wireless, Machine Gunnery, Aeroplane Motors, Aeroplanes, Aids to Flight, and Aerial Observation.

With the permission of the town authorities, it is expected that a military ceremony of some sort, either a parade or a review, will be given by the flying cadets about once a month on Nassau street. The music will be furnished by the School’s band, which, starting from a Fife and Drum Corps, now consists of 14 pieces. No definite numbers can be stated but it is understood that the School contains over 500 men, 25 per cent, of whom are discharged for one reason or another before finishing the course.

Every week the men are given “pass” from 1130 p. m. Saturday to 7 p. 111. on Sunday. One-third of the staff of the School of Military Aeronautics is composed of Princeton graduates. A list of the staff follows: Major Crissy (Commandant); Captains Wessellis, Braig, Zehnder; Lieutenants Condit, Beggs, Urner, Handy (Adj.), Sampson, McCabe, Chandler, Lambert, Roberts, Nolde, Johnson, Sizer, Tilton, and Barrett.”–Daily Princetonian, Volume 39, Number 300, 21 March 1918

Peterborough Cathedral Ceiling Reproduced

William Strickland (1787-1854), Strickland’s Lithographic Drawing of the Ancient Painted Ceiling in the Nave of Peterborough Cathedral. Together with descriptive letterpress (Peterborough: published by the author, W. Strickland; London: George Bell; Cambridge: E. Meadows [1849]). 12 pages and a folded color plate. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2015- in process.

Peterborough Cathedral ceiling

After a few pages of introductory text, this book consists of a single folded plate composed of 7 panels stretching slightly over 6 feet in length. The chromolithographic panorama reproduces the painted wood ceiling in the nave of Peterborough Cathedral, which dates from around 1230.

“The examples of painted woodwork of the Norman period are extremely uncommon, and it is doubtful whether any instances have come down to us, with the exception of the roof of the nave and transepts of Peterborough Cathedral. These roofs are flat and highly coloured, that over the south transept being plainer and somewhat earlier than that over the nave. On the latter are numerous figures within lozenge-shaped medallions of the Agnus Dei, various saints, and grotesque and allegorical figures.” —List of Buildings Having Mural Decorations by C.E. Keyser.

The plate is signed by the lithographers, Day & Son, and by the painter/lithographer John Sleigh (active 1819-1881, sometimes written John Sliegh). The architect and watercolorist William Strickland is recorded as working in London in 1839. It is conceivable that such a complex project might have taken ten years to complete; copying the ceiling, transferring the designs to multiple lithographic stones, and printing the plates. The color registration alone is an astonishing tour de force. Princeton is now holds only one of five copies in this country.

http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/peterborough-cathedral

Alfred Stieglitz’s Bookplate

Arthur Allen Lewis (1873-1957) Alfred Stieglitz’s Bookplate, 2 copies, no date [1913]. Color woodcut. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2007.01676

Although 291, Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Gallery, is primarily remembered for its photography shows, Stieglitz also showed prints and drawings. 291’s third exhibit of prints featured the work of Allen Lewis (1873-1957), which was also the artist’s first one-man show. The catalogue lists 43 drypoints, etchings, and bookplates with a commentary by Paul Haviland, who had introduced Lewis to Stieglitz. The text is also included in CameraWork: Paul B. Haviland, “Etchings by Allen Lewis,” CameraWork no. 27 (July 1909): 27.

According to Christian Peterson, “In 1913, Stieglitz commissioned Lewis to design not only a bookplate for him, which ended up being one of his most elaborate (utilizing ten separate printing blocks), but also Stieglitz’s collection label. The latter featured stylized lettering in a round-corned box and was affixed to many of the pictorial photographs that Stieglitz acquired over the years.”

Arthur Allen Lewis (1873-1957), Collection of Alfred Stieglitz, no date [1913]. Color woodcut. Graphic Arts collection GA 2007.01726

The Graphic Arts Collection is fortunate to hold 27 prints and bookplates by Lewis, along with many of his illustrated books. These were collected by Elmer Adler, who also commissioned designs from Lewis.

Print your thesis on satin and add a portrait

Robert Nanteuil, 1623-1678. Philippe, Fils de France, Duc d’Orléans, 1671. Engraving on satin cloth. References: Gordon no. 63B; Dumesnil no. 208; Petitjean & Wickert no. 188. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2005.01154. Gift of John Douglas Gordon, Class of 1905.

The subject of Nanteuil’s engraving is Philippe, duc d’Orleans (1640-1701), the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. Philippe was 20 years old when he succeeded his uncle Gaston as Duke of Orléans and then, lived for the rest of his life in the shadow of his older brother, Louis XIV. Twice married, his son Philippe II d’Orléans became regent for Louis XV.

This rare impression on satin is known as a thesis print and accompanies the thesis text, seen below. Inscribed: “Unico Regis Fratri Questio Theologica, etc …” it is the thesis of Guillaume Henry Le Jay, who commissioned the printing of the portrait and the text.

To see another example of a thesis print, this time on paper, see Steve Ferguson’s post at: https://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2009/04/jesuit-thesis-print-douay-1753/

See also: Henri-Guillaume Le Jay. Mémoire pour Messire Henry Guillaume Le Jay, evesque et comte de Cahors, deffendeur… contre Messire Charles de Lorraine, comte de Marsan. No publisher or date.

Thomas Rowlandson Site Is Live

http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0130

In 1928, the British caricature collector Dickson Q. Brown, Class of 1895, donated several thousand prints, drawings, and illustrated books to the Princeton University Library. Since there were no blogs at the time, the gift was announced by librarian James Thayer Gerould in The New York Times on May 6, 1928 and in the Christian Science Monitor on May 7, 1928.

Brown generously continued to augment this collection until his death in 1939. The largest group of caricatures was by Thomas Rowlandson (ca. 1756-1827) including 685 prints and 62 original drawings, many to this day never published.

Here for the first time are digital images of all Princeton’s Thomas Rowlandson prints, watercolors, and drawings from Dickson Brown: http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0130

For further details see: E.D.H. Johnson, “Special Collections at Princeton. V. The Works of Thomas Rowlandson” in the Princeton University Library Chronicle II, 1 (November, 1940) pp. 7-20 [full text] , and Joseph Grego. Rowlandson the Caricaturist. A Selection from his Works with Anecdotal Descriptions of his Famous Caricatures. (London, 1880). [2 vol. in Graphic Arts; this copy is annotated, presumably by D.Q. Brown, to indicate material in the collection]. Also see: F.J. Mather “Rowandson and Cruikshank” in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (4 March 1932).

Additional information on our caricature collection can be searched in the Visuals database for the Graphic Arts Collection: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/RBVisuals/index.htm

Additional gifts from Brown can be found in the James Gillray prints also digitized on this site: http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0015

Engelmann Archive of Proofs and Samples has been digitized

Last summer, we announced the acquisition of three amazing albums filled with chromolithographic proofs and samples from Godefroy Engelmann (1788-1839) and his Société Engelmann père et fils, including examples from both houses in Paris and in London. https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2014/07/21/archive-of-proofs-and-samples-from-the-societe-engelmann-pere-et-fils-ca-1839/ [old post]

https://dpul.princeton.edu/catalog/3484zk471 [new digital collection]

Now, every page with every printing sample has been digitized and made available online to researchers around the world. While we don’t believe there is a chronological sequence within the volumes, the printing for each of their projects is placed together with a blank sheet in between the next project. As we identify the books and commissions represented here, we will add the appropriate indexing terms.

It is our hope that printing and book historians will find this useful and report back to us as the organization of this complex collection becomes apparent. You are welcome to share comments on this page or send them to Princeton directly.

The publisher and printer Godefroy Engelmann I (1788-1839) had offices in a number of locations, including Rue Cassette No.18, Paris (1817); Rue Louis-le-grand No 27 à Paris (1827); Rue du Faub No.6, Montmatre, Paris (after 1829); Paris & Mulhausen (1826); 66 St Martin’s Lane, Strand, London (1826-7); 92 Dean Street, Soho, London (1827-9); and 14 Newman Street, London (1829-30).

The British Museum identifies Engelmann as: “Lithographic printer, famed ‘Körner’ (grinder) for crayon-lithographs and patentee of chromolithography. Originally from Colmar; trained in Munich; set up press in Paris in June 1816. He improved lithography, particularly by developing lithographic wash in 1819. In 1825 he created a new company in association with Jérémie Graf and Pierre Thierry and named ‘Société Engelmann et Cie’. In 1826 an annex company is founded in London and named ‘Société Engelmann, Graf, Coindet et Cie’, which was dissolved in 1833. Then Engelmann returned to Mulhouse and created the company ‘Société Engelmann, père et fils’.”

Take a look: https://dpul.princeton.edu/catalog/3484zk471

Picturesque Views in the North-Western Province of India

John Murray (1809-1898), Picturesque Views in the North-Western Provinces of India … with Descriptive Letter-press by Major-General J.T. Boileau (London: J. Hogarth, 1859). 12 pp., 26 salted-paper and albumen prints from paper negatives. Rebound in half straight grain red morocco over publisher’s red cloth covered boards. Purchased in part with funds provided by the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Graphic Arts Collection. GAX 2015- in process

The Graphic Arts Collection is thrilled to have acquired one of the most important publications of nineteenth-century photography in India. We are now the only library in the United States with a complete copy of John Murray’s Picturesque Views in the North-Western Provinces of India. OCLC records other copies at Trinity College Dublin; the British Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and University of Oxford.

This volume includes the best of Murray systematic record of Indian antiquities at four historic sites, including Agra, Mathura, Sikandra, and Fatehpur Sikri. While his views are primarily architectural, they are also populated with figures working and living within these striking settings. In this way, the photographs serve as a living record of India both before and after their first war for Independence, known to the British as the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

The geographic subjects depicted are as follows: Entrance to the Jumna Musjid; East pavilion and part of the Taj Gardens; The Jumma Musjid; Interior of the Delhi Gate of the Fort of Agra; Part of the river face of the fort; North face of the Khas Muhul; East side of the Khas Muhul; The Dewani Khas; A river-side view; Entrance gateway, Etimad-ood Dowlah’s tomb; West Pavilion, Etimad-ood-Dowlah’s tomb; The Cheenee Kee Rozu; Views on the banks of the Jumna; Gateway of the gardens of Secundra; Mausoleum of the Emperor Akbar at Secundra; A Hindoo Mut’h; Enclosure and Gateway at Futehpoor Seekree; Mausoleum of Shekh Suleem Chishtee; and Views at Nynee Tal.

Scottish-born John Murray served as an officer in the Bengal Medical Service, living and working in India from 1833 to 1871. In 1848, Murray was appointed civil surgeon of Agra and for the next 20 years the main focus of his professional life was the fight against cholera. He learned to make calotypes (paper negatives) in 1849, exhibiting with the Bengal Photographic Society in 1857. That year, Murray returned for a brief sojourn in London, where he showed his photographs to publisher J. Hogarth, who agreed to sell both individual prints and in sets. In 1859, Hogarth published the present book containing 26 of Murray’s photographs.

Regarded as one of the greatest of the early British photographers, Murray created extraordinarily large negatives and from them, positive salt and albumen prints, as much as 20 inches in length. The prints are recognized for their artistic quality, their technical prowess, and for their documentation of mid-century Indian architecture, which was the doctor’s other love.

It has been the great demand for Murray’s individual images that has led dealers and collectors to disbind and cut-up copies of this volume, leaving few in their original format, We are happy to preserve the book as Hogarth and Murray conceived of it.

The preliminary text is written by Major General John Theophilus Boileau (1805-1886), who entered military service in the Indian Army in 1820. Boileau rose to the position of Superintend Engineer in the Public Department of Works for the North-West Provinces, at Simla, before retiring with the rank of Major-General. Like Murray, Boileau was also active in British society and was named a fellow of the Royal Society.

Love Bites

If you are a lover of British caricature, consider joining your friends in Oxford for James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience? on March 28 and 29, 2015, organised by Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal; Martin Myrone, Tate Britain; and Michael Burden, New College, Oxford; with Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal

The two-day symposium is being held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray, based on New College’s outstanding collection.

The conference website states: “James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe.

In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people.”

Saturday March 28
I: Gillray in the Media Age
10.30 Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia
‘A Media Critic for the Intaglio Age’
11.00 Esther Chadwick, Yale University
‘Gillray’s Tree of Liberty: political communication and epistolary networks in the radical 1790s’
11.30 Kate Grandjouan, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Art History,
University of Belgrade
‘Gillray’s French jokes: the “sick-list” casualties of the 1790s’

12.00 Lunch
II: Gillray in the Colonial Networks: Positionings on Race and Slavery
1.00 Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator within Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, Princeton University
‘The Sale and Resale of English Beauties in the East Indies’
1.30 Amanda Lahikainen, Aquinas College
‘James Gillray and Representations of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign:
Islam as Republican Sacrilege’
2.00 Katherine Hart, Senior Curator of Collections & the Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood
1918 Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth
College
‘James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform’
2.30 Coffee
III: The Artist and Formal Means
3.00 Ersy Contogouris, Université de Québec à Montreal
‘Gillray’s Preparatory Drawings’
3.30 Cynthia Roman, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
‘James Gillray and the Satiric Alternative to Painting History’

Sunday March 29
IV: The Artist and Literary Means
10.15 David Taylor, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English and Comparative Literary
Studies, University of Warwick
‘Gillray, Milton, and the “Caricatura Sublime”’
10.45 Rachel M. Brownstein, Professor of English, City University of New York
‘James Gillray and Jane Austen: Aesthetic Affinities’
11.15 Coffee
V: Gillray, the People, the Academy and Revolution
11.45 Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Associate Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London
‘Caricature’s unconscious: James Gillray and the Academy’
12.15 Ian Haywood, Professor of English Co-Director, Centre for Research in Romanticism
University of Roehampton, London
‘Gillray’s valediction: The Life of William Cobbett’

Six billboards found

Taking a few minutes to finally unfold this small pile of paper led to a happy Friday afternoon discovery. The Graphic Arts Collection has six billboard size lithographs, probably meant for the outside marquee of a London theater. We have prints for The Pirates of Penzance; Rudigore; Trial by Jury; Patience; The Mikado; and H.M.S. Pinafore.

Once unfolded, four sections merge to form a poster approximately 96 x 80 inches, printed in bright, unmodulated colors. Each one has the logo of S. C. Allen and Company Limited, a printing firm that was active in the 1920s-1930s, in London and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their main office is listed as 4 Lisle Street, London WC2 7BG. Note: on the one above, their company logo is placed over another company’s logo, meaning the poster was reused.

Each one is designed by the famous British poster artist Stewart Browne, active at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. There is a good interview with the artist in this journal : Frank Millward, “A Chat with Stewart Browne,” Poster 2, no. 10 (April 1899): 146–47. Graphic Arts Off-Site Storage RCPXG-6990572, also available online.

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