Comparing Broadsides

Only two copies of this enormous broadside can be found today in public collections around the world. One is at Princeton University [above]. Although it is not dated, I believe it was printed in the spring of 1867, two and a half years after the Morant Bay rebellion on the island of Jamaica.

The printer of the sheet was Edward Cornelius Osborne, who opened a Birmingham book and print shop in 1831. Osborne was also a strong supporter of the anti-slavery society and a member of the Jamaica Committee (pro-Gordon and anti-Eyre).

Why he printed such a large broadside, so long after the rebellion, is the subject of a paper at “Printers Unite!” this week at the Marx Memorial Library. For more information, see: http://www.marx-memorial-library.org/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/event/info&Itemid=216&reset=1&id=101

This is one half of the enormous Rare Book reading room at the British Library on Euston Road. It is only one of many such spaces of equally impressive size at the main branch of the Library.

This is where I found the other copy of Osborne’s Jamaica broadside, so large it had to be printed in two sheets. So large it required the desk space usually allotted to three separate readers. Our sincere thanks to the entire staff of the rare book division, who all helped in the pursuit and retrieval of this item today.

Thanks also to Linda Oliveira and AnnaLee Pauls [at the top] for their help photographing the broadside.

The March of the Guards to Finchley

William Hogarth (1679-1764), The March of the Guards to Finchley, 1750. Oil on canvas. The Foundling Hospital Museum, London.

Luke Sullivan (1705-1771) after William Hogarth (1697-1764), The March to Finchley–A Representation of the March of the Guards towards Scotland in the Year 1745, 1761. Etching and engraving. Graphic Arts Collection GC106.

The Graphic Arts Collection has an almost complete set of individual engravings by and after William Hogarth, as well as each of the bound sets of his work. We do not, however, have any of his oil paintings and so, it was fun today to see the oil on canvas [above] from which a series of engravings were made.

Hogarth offered this painting to King George II as a gift but the King foolishly refused it. “So Hogarth gave the first 2000 people to place an advance order for engravings the option of buying a lottery ticket to win the painting. When the day of the lottery came Hogarth had 167 tickets left, and he gave all of them to the Foundling Hospital. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Hospital won the painting.”–Foundling Hospital Museum.

Princeton does, by the way, also have an advance order ticket for this painting but unfortunately, not the winning ticket.

See also our exhibition website: http://rbsc.princeton.edu/hogarth/home

Congratulations on the 50th Anniversary of “A Humument”

It is fifty years since Tom Phillips began work on A Humument. This fall Phillips, who was a Director’s Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study from 2005 to 2011, will launch the final edition of the book, bringing the work to its completion.

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=0c0adc07d2f9eddc1cbbe35e2&id=295dc79bf6&e=07fe99d309

Published today, 27th October, 2016, the final installment of A Humument will appear in three formats: paperback, hardback, and a limited special edition of 100 numbered copies presented in a clamshell box with a signed and editioned print.

Phillips remembers, “A Humument started life around noon on the 5th of November 1966 at a propitious place. Austin’s Furniture Repository stood on Peckham Rye, where William Blake saw his first angels and which Van Gogh must have passed once or twice on his way to Lewisham. As usual on a Saturday morning Ron Kitaj and I were prowling the huge warehouse in search of bargains. When we arrived at the racks of cheap and dusty books left over from house clearances I boasted to Ron that if I took the first one that cost threepence I could make it serve a serious long-term project. My eye quickly chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we found it had the fateful price. ‘If it’s a dime,’ said Ron ‘then that’s your book: and I’m your witness.’”

“Neither a novel, a poem, an artist’s book, or a graphic novel,” wrote Sebastian Smee, “Tom Phillips’s ‘A Humument,’ on show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is a little bit of all these things and one thing incontrovertibly: a masterpiece. It’s also, uncomfortably, a parasite. Sucking steadily at the life juices of an earlier attempt at art, a late-19th-century novel called ‘A Human Document’ by W.H. Mallock, it has transformed its forgotten host page by page, edition by edition, into something far more imaginative and lasting. And while — like a charming houseguest grown fond of the husband he cuckolds — Phillips is unfailingly well-mannered toward Mallock’s book, he has nonetheless thoroughly bested it.” – Smee, “Tom Phillips’s brilliance on every page,” (Boston Globe July 04, 2013)

A Lecture on Heads

In honor of “Reading Faces,” the standing-room-only panel held a few days ago at the Princeton University Art Museum, here is an 1808 “Lecture on Heads”. The University’s scholars focused on caricatures and studies of expressions, approaching the works of art from the perspectives of art history, psychology, and neuroscience.

Speakers included Anne McCauley, David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art; Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology; Judy Fan, postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute; and Veronica White, Curator for Academic Programs.

George Alexander Stevens, on the other hand, got the idea of a lecture by a country carpenter, who made the character-blocks that formed the subjects of illustrations. It proved an extraordinary success in the hands of the originator. He carried it about England, through the United States, and on finally to Ireland.

After a certain point (there is disagreement on the exact year) Stevens sold his act to the comedian Charles Lee Lewes, who continued to perform the “Lectures” for several years. Lewes is given credit for the performance in this book. The 25 plates in this volume were designed by George Woodward but etched and colored by Thomas Rowlandson.

Stereo-graphoscope

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a nineteenth-century stereo-graphoscope in a molded thermoplastic case. This unusual model has a small section at the bottom for three colored glass filters to be used in the graphoscope lens.

Like the zograscope of the eighteenth century, this optical viewer was most often used in a family parlor for evening entertainment. The graphoscope’s round magnifying glass allows for detail views of cabinet cards, tintypes, engravings, and other single photographic images, while the lower stereo glasses are for the viewing of stereographic cards. The whole device folds up into a small box.

Thermoplastic cases, also called Union cases, were first developed in the 1850s for housing daguerreotypes. The earliest patent was filed by Samuel Peck in Connecticut and the use of this material on the Stereo-graphoscope dates it earlier than other wood or leather models.

According to an anonymous author in the British Journal of Photography, “the action of the graphoscope . . . is one [subject] that seems to be very little understood. Everyone who has used the appliance is familiar with its effect, but very few seem to be prepared with an explanation of the relief observed in a single photograph when it is observed through a single large lens.”

He goes on to explain, “a graphoscope is a large single lens of sufficient diameter to enable both eyes to observe the photograph, and the three conditions we have referred to are: first, a condition governing the appreciation of perspective; second, a condition peculiar to the formation of a virtual image of a plane object by a single positive lens; third, a condition peculiar to the binocular observation of any diagram or picture through a large lens.

We have several times pointed out the extreme importance of true perspective in connection with the subject of stereoscopy, and also when referring to the matter of monocular relief. … the trouble with photographs is that the proper view point is very often so near the print that distinct vision from that point is impossible. One remedy for this is to stop down the eye pupil by observing the object through a pinhole. This so increases the range of distinct vision that the proper position can often be found. Another remedy is the use of a magnifying lens to increase the size of the picture, and also the viewing distance, up to a convenient dimension. This, then, is one of the functions of the graphoscope.” —The British Journal of Photography 54, no. 2448 (April 5, 1907)

Caramels and Actors

American Caramel Company. Trade cards featuring actors and actresses of the silent film era (Lancaster and York, PA: American Caramel Company, [1921]). 120 photolithographic cards. Graphic Arts Collection 2016- in process

The Graphic Arts Collection holds a collection of printed candy wrappers, begun as a joke by Princeton University students: https://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2008/11/graphic_candy.html. Since then, we continue to add to the collection, such as cookie trading cards from the LU company: https://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2008/09/who_likes_our_biscuits.html

We recently acquired actor trading cards distributed with caramels.
According to the Hershey Community Archives, “Milton Hershey started the Lancaster Caramel Company in 1886 after he returned to Lancaster, Pennsylvania following the failure of his New York City candy business. The Lancaster business would be his third confectionery venture. . . . When Milton Hershey sold the Lancaster Caramel Company on August 10, 1900 to the American Caramel Company for $1 million, he retained the rights to the Hershey Chocolate Company.”

In the 1920s, the American Caramel Company manufactured sets of photolithographic trade cards with collectable portraits of actors and actresses. Information about the current projects and studio are also included. Anyone who bought a caramel, also received a trade card. The more caramels you bought, the closer you got to acquiring a whole set.

The set was issued twice, one in a set of 80 cards and another in a set of 120. The set of 120 cards includes the same portraits as the set of 80 with 40 additional images. Unfortunately, we do not have the 15 cent album to hold our set.

Here’s a list of the actors and actresses:

1. William S. Hart; 2. Anita Stewart; 3. Wesley Barry; 4. Geraldine Farrar; 5. Buster Keaton; 6. May Allison; 7. Will Rogers; 8. Pearl White; 9. Jackie Coogan; 10. Dorothy Dalton; 11. Tom Moore; 12. Shirley Mason; 13. Theodore Roberts; 14. Eva Novak; 15. Thomas Meighan; 16. Bessie Barriscale; 17. George Beban; 18. Kathlyn Williams; 19. Mabel Normand; 20. Sessue Hayakawa; 21. Colleen Moore; 22. Jack W. Kerrigan; 23. Mary Alden; 24. Rudolph Valentino; 25. Priscilla Dean; 26. Wallace Reid; 27. Gladys Walton; 28. Pauline Frederick; 29. Irene Castle; 30. Bert Lytell; 31. Rubye De Remer; 32. Lois Weber; 33. Marshall Neilan; 34. Irene Rich; 35. Eileen Sedgwick; 36. Herbert Rawlinson; 37. Max Graf; 38. Erich Von Stroheim; 39. Texas Guinan; 40. William Russell; 41. Jack Holt; 42. Marie Prevost; 43. Eddie Polo; 44. Conrad Nagel; 45. Viola Dana; 46. Renee Adoree; 47. Hoot Gibson; 48. Agnes Ayres; 49. William Farnum; 50. Edna Murphy; 51. David Powell; 52. Clara Kimball Young; 53. Art Acord; 54. Ethel Clayton; 55. Harry Carey; 56. Betty Compson; 57. Buck Jones; 58. Helene Chadwick; 59. Elliott Dexter; 60. Ann Forrest; 61. Monte Blue; 62. Eileen Percy; 63. Dustin Farnum; 64. Miss Du Pont; 65. Lila Lee; 66. Jack Gilbert; 67. Hazel Daly; 68. Doris Kenyon; 69. James Kirkwood; 70. Lois Wilson; 71. Nell Shipman; 72. Naomi Childers; 73. Richard Dix; 74. Johnnie Walker; 75. Hope Hampton; 76. Tom Mix; 77. John Bowers; 78. Gloria Swanson; 79. Cullen Landis; 80. Frank Mayo; 81. Mae Busch; 82. Maude George; 83. June Caprice; 84. Tom Santschi; 85. Charlie Chaplin; 86. William De Mille; 87. Harold Lloyd; 88. Robert McKim; 89. Harry “Snub” Pollard; 90. Claire Adams; 91. Katherine Spencer; 92. Baby Peggy; 93. Mildred Davis; 94. Josephine Hill; 95. Alice Lake; 96. Virginia Brown Faire; 97. Nazimova; 98. Louise Lorraine; 99. Kathleen Meyers; 100. Gertrude Olmsted; 101. Elmo Lincoln; 102. Charles Ogle; 103. Pat O’Malley; 104. Jack Perrin; 105. Lee Moran; 106. Milton Sills; 107. Ben Turpin; 108. Cecil B De Mille; 109. Marcella Pershing; 110. Mabel Ballin; 111. Betty Ross Clarke; 112. Anna Q Nilsson; 113. Ina Claire; 114. Marie Mosquini; 115. Pola Negri; 116. Alice Terry; 117. Ruth Roland; 118. Virginia Warwick; 119. Mary Astor; 120. Mary Philbin; 121. Billie Dove; 122. Jack Mulhall; 123. Martha Mansfield; 124. Gareth Hughes; 125. Myrtle Lind; 126. Conrad Nagel; 127. Jane Novak; 128. Clarence Burton; 129. Mary Jane Sanderson; 130. George Larkin; 131. Dorothy Phillips; 132. Eugene O’Brien; 133. Mabel Juliene Scott; 134. Walter Hiers; 135. Mary Glynn; 136. Carl Gantvoort; 137. Constance Binney; 138. William Boyd; 139. Marguerite Courtot; 140. May McAvoy

Walt Whitman and Aaron Siskind

“You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! . . . you are dear to me.”—Walt Whitman

Sidney Shiff (1924-2010) acquired the Limited Editions Club (LEC) from Cardavon Press in 1978. He soon became known for the prominent artists he convinced to work on his books, including Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elizabeth Catlett, Francesco Clemente, Ellsworth Kelly, Sean Scully, and in 1990, Aaron Siskind.

Siskind was 86 years old when he agreed to collaborate on a LEC volume with Shiff. Having once aspired to be a poet himself, Siskind chose Whitman from Shiff’s list suggested authors, just as Edward Weston did for his LEC volume in 1942.

To complete the commission, Siskind walked outside his Providence, Rhode Island home and photographed the tar recently poured into the cracks of the local concrete road. Six of his detailed negatives were transferred to copper plates by Paul Taylor and printed as intaglio prints by Clary Nelson to Renaissance Press.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), Song of the Open Road (New York: Limited Editions Club; printed by Paul Taylor, 1990). Letterpress with six photogravures. Designed by Kevin Begos Jr. and Dan Carr. Setin English Monotype Scotch at Golgonooza Letter Foundry by Julia Ferrari and Dan Carr. The text was printed by Heritage Printers on a paper made at Carterie Enrico Magnani. Edition: 89/550. Graphic Arts Collection 2016- in process

Song of the Open Road
By Walt Whitman

3. You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!

You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

Face powder envelopes, Kyoto 1815

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a sample album holding nearly 200 colorful cosmetic packages of Oshiroi or white face powder. The ephemeral decorative envelopes are pasted onto 45 unnumbered leaves with various printed and manuscript labels. The final leaf holds a hand-written note indicating the album was produced in Kyoto in 1815.

“In Japan, beauty has long been associated with a light skin tone. During the Nara Period (710–94), women painted their face with a white powder called oshiroi, and in the Heian Period (794–1185), a white facial color continued to stand as a symbol of beauty. References to the beauty of light skin tone are found in the Diary of Lady Murasaki and Tale of Genji. More than a thousand years ago, cosmetics for whitening the skin had already become a status symbol among the aristocracy.”–Originally written in Japanese by Ushijima Bifue.

This marvelous sample book was assembled in 1815 for the Fujiwara Harima Ishizuka Face Powder Company and the Chikamaro Face Powder Company of Kyoto by a cosmetics distributor named Omi-ya.

The early pages hold thirty sets of three labels each: the first label tells in rapturous detail of the special qualities of the contents, the second gives the brand name, and the third the manufacturer’s name.

Following this are 107 color-printed labels for the envelopes (each including a brand name), then another 52 color-printed labels, and finally the actual face powder envelopes. The decorative designs are either color woodblock prints or made from special paper with metallic flakes including gold.

This album was once owned by Dr. Kokichi Kano (1865-1942), a Japanese literature scholar, who came from Oodate City, Akita Prefecture. Kano began his career as the principal of First Higher School (1898-1906) and was then named President of a liberal arts college, Kyoto Imperial University (1906-1908).

Mr. Crindle and The Man in the Moon

The British artist Henry George Hine (1811-1895) left Punch in 1844 to freelance for a variety of other satirical newspapers and magazines, including Great Gun, Puck, and, beginning in 1847, The Man in the Moon. Although it had a smaller format, Man in the Moon boasted a large, fold-out cartoon narrative at the front of every monthly issue.

The first fold-out told the Life and Death of Don Guzzles of Carrara (artist unknown), followed the next month with The Foreign Gentleman in London; or the English Adventures of M. Vanille, drawn by Cham (1819-1879).

Man in the Moon’s third issue offered the first of nine installments chronicling Mr. Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town. Hine collaborated on the story and designs with Albert Smith (1816-1869), who had also left Punch for this new journal.

The Crindle series became so popular with the British public that the nine parts were combined and published as a continuous narrative in four pages, titled The Surprising Adventures and Rapid Career Upon Town of Mr. Crindle (recently acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection).

Not to be outdone, the Paris publisher Charles Philipon (1800-1861) had Gustave Doré (1832-1883) create a revised version called L’Homme aux Cent Mille Écus (The Man with a Hundred Thousand Crowns) which ran in Journal pour Rire between January 12 and June 15, 1850.

The Man in the Moon: A Monthly Review and Bulletin of New Measures, New Men, New Books, New Plays, New Jokes, and New Nonsense; Being an Act for the Amalgamation of the Broad Gauge of Fancy with the Narrow Gauge of Fact into the Grand General Amusement Junction (London: Clarke, 1847-1849). Edited by Albert Smith (1816-1869) and Angus B. Reach (1821-1856). Artists include Smith; George Augustus Sala (1828-1895); Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne, 1815-1882); Joseph Kenny Meadows (1790-1874); Lionel Percy Smythe (1839-1918); Cham (1819-1879); Robert B. Brough (1828-1860); Henry George Hine (1811-1895); Isaac Nicholson; and Thomas A. Mayhew. Graphic Arts Collection (GA) 2005-0423N

Le Journal pour rire (Paris: Aubert, 1848-1855). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2011-0030E

Here are some details:

Wild Lives

Our sincere thanks to everyone who turned out for our program “Wild Lives: Catesby, Audubon, Lear, and Ford” on Sunday afternoon. We were treated to a fascinating series of talks by Robert M. Peck, Class of 1974; Aaron M. Bauer; Neal Woodman, and Walton Ford. Each one, captivating on its own but surprisingly interconnected.

We recommend you look further into the work of each of these remarkable speakers, their books and catalogues, as well as Walton Ford’s upcoming exhibitions. Here are a few images from the day.

Thanks also to our colleagues in Guyot Hall, the perfect spot for these talks and for a break together with the dinosaurs.