Posted for everyone who is feeling a lack of time these days.
George Cruikshank (1792-1878), Re-issue of Scraps and sketches … In monthly parts … Part 1st. Illustrations of time … (London: W. Kent & Co. [1860?]). 7 col. pl. on which are designs by G. Cruikshank, all of which originally appeared in 1827. Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Oversize 2015-0070F
Time Badly Employed
No More Time
Term Time
Time Gone, Past Recalling
Too Much Time
James Gillray (1757-1815), Blowing up the Pic Nic’s; – or – Harlequin Quixotte attacking the puppets. Vide Tottenham Street Pantomime, 1802. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2008.01079.
Jim Sherry writes, “Now that I am retired from AT&T, I am returning to my interest in caricature, but using the skills and knowledge I acquired in my work life to reach what I hope will be a more general audience.” In honor of the anniversary of the British caricaturist James Gillray, Sherry has mounted an online catalogue raisonne, with an index to many of the leading institutional collections of these prints. Several collections will be a surprise to those who only use the British Museum’s collection. http://www.james-gillray.org/index.html
“So the site you see before you is solely designed, produced, and written by me,” Sherry continues. “Its mistakes, limitations, and omissions are likewise my responsibility. But in the spirit of Bell Labs, I hope that it inspires and facilitates further research on an amazing and under-rated artist, James Gillray. . . . The following catalogue is an attempt to address that problem. Here you can find a listing of all the prints attributed to James Gillray, satiric or otherwise, in what I believe is their proper chronological order.
Launched on June 1st, 2015, the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, Sherry asks other enthusiasts to help proof and enhance his site. He requests that anyone interested “feel free to contact me with corrections or suggestions.” Congratulations on his good work.
Jim Sherry
http://www.jim-sherry.com
Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1813-1884), [Sad Career of a Poor Girl in a Great City] published in Brother Jonathan, Christmas 1850/New Years 1851. Wood engraving. Sinclair Hamilton Collection.
Edward Harington (1754-1807), A Schizzo on the Genius of Man: In which, among various Subjects, the Merits of Mr. Thomas Barker, the Celebrated Young Painter of Bath, is particularly Considered, and his Pictures Reviewed, by the Author of An Excursion from Paris to Fontainbleau. For the Benefit of the Bath Casualty Hospital. Two etched plates by G. Steart. First Edition. Bath: printed by R. Cruttwell; and sold by G.G.J. and J. Robinson, London, and all the Booksellers in Bath, 1793. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2015- in process
“D—e, Sir, if tis not as fine a Moon as ever shone from Heaven to lighten this villainous world, and all true judges of Painting will say so, you never saw, nor never had, or ever will have, such a glorious moon in Wales! No, Sir, you must come to England to be enlightened. Vide note to pages 59, &e.”
Edward Harington (1754-1807) of Harington-Place, Bath, was the son of Dr. Henry Harington, noted musician, physician to the Mineral Water Hospital, and Mayor of Bath.
An Excursion from Paris to Fontainbleau was published in 1786 and Harington was fearful of the French Revolution along with the “rude, ragged rabble.” A Schizzo on the Genius of Man was intended to prove that genius is conferred not by nurture but by nature, not by a process of evolution but through the agency of divine providence.
Harington took the Bath artist Thomas Barker (1769-1847) [see yesterday’s post] as an example of an individual whose talents were born within him, not acquired. Unlike some painters “who basely prostitute their talents to despicable face-painting,” Barker had “a too generous disdain for the love of money to pervert the talents which Heaven had given him.” Even Gainsborough, he averred, “never possessed a genius so strong and so universal.”
The Graphic Arts Collection has acquired George Cruikshank’s copy of this book with his bold signature and the date 1850 at the head of the title. Cruikshank also added a manuscript note, in ink, in the margin of p. 225.
Discussing Raphael’s cartoon of the The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, he writes: “The boats in the carton [sic] are so small in proportion to the figures that they look ridiculous. The two fishermen who are draging [sic] the net are also bad, both being in the same attitude nearly. The other parts of the picture are beautiful – G.C.”
1850 was a pivotal year in the life of George Cruikshank (1792-1878). His first wife, Mary Anne, died in May 1849 and he collapsed, both emotionally and financially. In March 1850 he married Eliza Widdison, and they moved to 48 Mornington Place.
Cruikshank slowly returned to his art, and turned to oil-paintings, though without the success of his smaller-scale etchings. His studio also became home to his maid, Adelaide Attree, who bore him 11 children between 1854 and 1875. His other passion was temperance and he came to be regarded as “the St. George of water drinkers”.
Bookseller’s label of H. M. Gilbert of Southampton (established 1859). The half-title has the ink signature of the potter William Henry Goss (1833-1906), and a note “See in my library “Barker’s Landscape Scenery” and my remarks therein about pictures in my collection by J. Barker the son of Thomas Barker” with his signature and date 6th December 1887.
Thomas Barker (1769-1847), Forty Lithographic Impressions from Drawings of Landscape Scenery by Thomas Barker, Selected from His Studies of Rustic Figures after Nature (Bath, printed by D.J. Redman, 1813). Lithographs printed on different color paper with added sepia wash. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2015- in process
“Until 1812 there seems to have been only one set of lithographic equipment in England, for the press set up by Senefelder passed successively from André to Vollweiler and then to the quarter-Master-General’s Office. But at the close of 1812 or the beginning of 1813 Redman decided to branch out on his own and set up the first English lithographic press outside London at the fashionable city of Bath.
No doubt the work he had been doing at the Horse guards was thoroughly menial compared with the printing he had previously done with André and Vollweiler, and at Bath he directed his attention principally to the printing of artists’ drawings. While there he came into contact with Bankes, who wrote and published the first English treatise on lithography at Bath in 1813.
It is reasonable to suppose that it was Redman who instructed Bankes in the technical side of the process, for he is described in the text as being ‘under the patronage of the artists there, and at the service of the public, to provide the necessary materials, viz. the ink and pencil, and to prepare the stone, and take the impressions from drawings made on it’. Moreover, it was provably through Redman that Bankes obtained some of the original stones of the Specimens of Polyautography, for once again there is a suggestion that these should be reissued.
With the removal of Redman from London, Bath was now the centre of lithography in England—at least for the printing of artists’ drawings—and all the important productions for the next three years were printed by Redman there.”–Michael Twyman Lithography 1800-1850, pp.34-35.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was an avid naturalist, dedicated to protecting both wildlife and natural resources. In keeping with the time, he liked to decorate his homes with mounted specimens of the animals he hunted and killed.
When Roosevelt was elected president and moved into the White House, he hired the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to oversee the modernization and redecorating of the residence. Many changes were made, including the removal of two small fireplaces the State Dining Room. In their place, a massive stone fireplace was added with an enormous moose head over the mantel. This trophy and the other changes Roosevelt made became the subject of many editorials and cartoons.
When Roosevelt decided not to run in 1908, he gave his full support to William Howard Taft (1857-1930) who easily won the election. This cartoon shows Taft entering the White House and standing in shock at the additional renovations that he found.
Albert Levering (1869-1929), The Teddyfication of the White House, 1909. Pen and ink drawing. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.02605.
White House State Dining Room after renovation.
Albert Levering’s cartoon “The Teddyfication of the White House,” published as the centerfold in Puck v. 65, no. 1669 (February 24, 1909).
Part One: Searching
Dorothy Day (1897-1980), founder and director of the Catholic Worker, met the Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) in 1949 at a conference on religion and publishing. Day asked the artist if he would donate some images to her publication and he agreed without hesitation.
In fact, over the next thirty years, Eichenberg allowed her to use anything he had drawn or printed anytime she pleased. And she did. His most famous wood engraving “The Peaceable Kingdom” (1950) was reprinted in The Catholic Worker ten times between 1953 and 1989.
When Day wrote an autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she asked Eichenberg to provide the illustrations. The wood engravings posted here serve as frontispieces to each of the book’s three sections.
In his oral history for the Archives of American Art, recorded between May 14 and December 7, 1979, Eichenberg spoke about his friend:
Part Two: Natural Happiness
“Dorothy Day was, from a personal point of view, perhaps the most important influence in my life. But, let’s say from an artistic point of view or from the point of view of an illustrator, she was not of any great influence. Because what I did for her was more or less addressed, as she often said, to those people who could not read—to the illiterate. She said she had seen clippings of my work in the hovels of coal miners and so on, people in all parts of the world; people who could not read the Catholic Worker but they understood my very simple images of saints and portraits of people important in the Catholic Worker movement.”
“I met her at a conference on religious publishing in Pendle Hill which is a Quaker study center in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia – Wallingford. . . . That was around 1940, I would say. I was sitting next to her and I just fell in love with her as a person. She’s really great. She makes you feel at ease and I could talk to her like to an old friend. In the course of the round table there, we talked about the Catholic Worker – publishing, you know. She knew I had illustrated books and she said, “You know, I have trouble finding Catholic artists to work for me because we have no money.” That didn’t sound so good to me! She should find a lot of artists to work for her but she can’t. So she said, “Would you work for me?” And I said immediately, “Yes.” And so the next week she called me up and we got together. I gave talks there very often.”
Part Three: Love is the Measure
“And I told Dorothy from the very beginning, whenever she wants the use of my work, she can use [it]. She doesn’t even have to ask me. But she does ask me. And now . . . with copyright you have to be a little more careful. I just threw my bread upon the water and see it coming back to me somehow in the form of real satisfaction that my work touched people. Sometimes she asked me to illustrate a certain event that happened in the life of the Catholic Worker.”
Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Long Loneliness; the Autobiography of Dorothy Day, illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg (New York: Harper, [1952]). Firestone Library (F) BX4668.D3 A33 1952
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), President of the United States of America, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. “Signed Directly on copper from the life Walter Tittle Aug. 19 1920”. Graphic Arts Collection.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/naval-conference
The Washington Naval Conference (also called the Washington Arms Conference or the Washington Disarmament Conference), was chaired by President Warren G. Harding in Washington D.C. from November 12, 1921 to February 6. 1922. Delegates included representatives from the United States, Japan, China, France, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Portugal. As a result of these talks, three major treaties were signed: Four-Power Treaty, Five-Power Treaty (more commonly known as the Washington Naval Treaty), the Nine-Power Treaty, and a number of smaller agreements. The link above offers more information.
The American artist Walter Tittle was commissioned to create portraits of the delegates, sketched with a needle directly onto copper plates. The final portfolio included twenty-five drypoints: Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State; Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge; Sir Auckland Campbell Geddes; Earl David Beatty; Sir Robert Laird Borden; Admiral Baron Kato, Premier of Japan; Prince Togugawa; Signor Carlo Schanzer; Admiral de Bon; Marquis Visconti Venosta; M. Albert Sarraut; Hon. David Lloyd George; Sir Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey; Sir Alfred Ernle Montacute Chatfield; Viscount Lee of Fareham; Lord Riddell of Walton Heath; Earl of Cavan; M. René Viviani, Premier of France; M. Fournier Sarlovèze; Marshall Foch; Dr. Sao-ke Alfred Sze; Hon. Elihu Root; W. Hon. John W. Garrett; Arthur Balfour; and Aristide Briand. A few are posted here.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Prince Tokugawa, President of the House of Peers in Japan, one of the Japanese representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle” in pencil. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of the Earl of Balfour, K. G., one of the British representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, one of the American representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, 1922”. Graphic Arts Collection
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Aristide Briand, Premier of France, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Albert Sarraut, Minister for the French Colonies, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed in pencil “Walter Tittle”. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Admiral Ferdinand H. H. de Bon, one of the French representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed in pencil “Walter Tittle”. Graphic Arts Collection.
Walter Tittle (1883-1966), Portrait of Admiral Baron Kato, Premier of Japan, one of the Japanese representatives at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, 1921-22. Drypoint. Signed “Walter Tittle Washington, Dec. 1921”. Graphic Arts Collection.
See also: Hugh Latimer, Naval Disarmament, a Brief Record from the Washington Conference to Date (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1930). Firestone Library JZ5625 .L385 1930
A Momentous Gathering — But Limited Success. That Was Then: October 1921 by John S. Weeren: https://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2015/10/21/that-was-then/
Beginning in 1848, the four Smith brothers (Benjamin, Francis, David, and George) produced a portfolio of forty lithographic city views printed by Boston and New York artists. The best of their stable was John William Hill (1812-1879), who went to work for the Smiths in 1850.
Over the next five years Hill completed watercolor views of Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Salem, and many other locations. These were drawn onto stone by artists at the Endicott lithography firm, including D.W. Moody, Charles Parsons, J.H. Colen, and Napoleon Sarony.
In the late 1850s, Hill fell under the spell of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. He left the commercial field of city birds-eye views for the pursuit of aesthetic landscapes and still lifes.
J. H. Colen after John William Hill (1812-1879), Salem, Mass., 1854. Lithograph. Published by Smith Brothers, 59 Beekman Street, New York. Graphic Arts Collection. Gift of Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953.
After his first year publishing Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper successfully, Leslie printed a long and detailed description of how the illustrations for his paper were accomplished. This is something several other American papers had failed to perfect and so, everyone took notice.
This post includes a long section of that text, along with the illustrations that accompanied the August 2, 1856 article. Note especially the physical cutting out of the whites in each matrix.
These illustrations were cut by the Irish/American wood engraver John William Orr (1815-1887), who was much in demand as a book and magazine illustrator and engraver.
A complete transcription can be found here: how illustarted newpapers are made
“. . . Immediately one or more artists are dispatched to the point of interest, and by long experience hasty sketches are made that are to be elaborated when put on the wood, which is the next stage of their advancement. The wood used is that known as “boxwood,” so much a favorite as a shrub in our gardens, but which in Turkey expands by slow growth into a tree with a trunk of a few inches in diameter. 
This valuable product is nearly as hard as flint, and can be cut with great precision. From the diminutive size natural to its growth, it is only possible to produce pieces large enough for the purposes of an illustrative paper by joining innumerable small bits together and fastening them by screws on the back of the block, as will be seen by the engraving.
The art required to perform this apparently simple mechanical process cannot be understood except by those directly engaged in the business, or by those who have to use the wood to print from after it is engraved. The block of wood having been selected, and the “travelling artists” having supplied the subject, other artists again are employed in putting the design on the block, which when done is one of the most beautiful works of art without color that can be imagined.
The hour of publication is near at hand, and here we have a two-page picture to be engraved, which cannot be completed by a single hand under several days of hard labor. What is to be done?
The screws which hold the small parts of the wood together are unloosened, and the block is divided into ten or twenty parts. Upon each there is but the fragment of the drawing; one has a little bit of sky, another a group of children cut in two in the middle . . .
Ten or fifteen engravers now seize these fragmentary pieces, and work night and day; not a moment is lost; they silently and industriously pursue their work, and the surfaces of the several blocks are cut away save where they are marked by the image of the artist’s pencil, and we have left the surface which makes the impression on our paper known as a wood engraving.
“The engravers’ tools are very few in number, and very simple in construction. They are called:
1. Flat tool; 2, 3, 4 and 5, gravers; 6 and 7, tint tools; 8, sand-bag and stand on which the block is laid; 9, scraper; 10, chisel—and cost comparatively but a small sum; yet with these simple tools the engraver, with an incomprehensible certainty to the spectator, runs through the complicated outlines of the innumerable forms with make up the pictures of our weekly edition, displaying a skill of handling to our notions as wonderful as the touch of the artist himself.
…The highest mechanical ingenuity is brought into requisition to create a “cylinder press,” one of which will quietly perform the labor of many hands; and do it with a neatness and dispatch impossible to be obtained in any other way. In forms put upon the press filled with engravings is used what is termed an “overlay,” the construction of which requires much experience.
An impression is taken of each engraving on thick paper, and then, they are laid upon a table, and by a sharp knife all the white parts of the picture are removed; when this is done, the dissected picture is put upon the cylinder of the press in such a way as to make unusual pressure upon the engraving, or especial parts of it, while being printed. It is in this way that such brilliant effects are often produced. Were this otherwise, the pictures would come up with the same even tone, so peculiar and so beautiful to solid columns of type.”
