A Collection of Grimaces

No 38. L’Enfance no 2 [Childhood, no. 2].

Like many international print collections, Graphic Arts held a couple satirical prints after the French painter Louis-Léopold Boilly, acquired here and there over the years. One was even used at the top of this blog for a while. We have now acquired the original complete bound set of Boilly’s lithographs known as A Collection of Grimaces, including a title page and 95 prints published between 1823 and 1828.

In the Infinite Jest exhibition catalogue, Nadine Orenstein wrote:

“Long active as a genre painter and portraitist, late in his career Boilly began a series entitled Recueil de Grimaces that comprised ninety-six lithographs showing tight clusters of heads set against blank back-grounds. The first few prints were mainly studies of expression, but he soon extended the images into representations of social types ranging from beggars to art connoisseurs. These extremely successful social satires served as important sources for caricaturists of the following decades, including Honoré Daumier.” —Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (2011)

Here are a few samples:
No 39. Les Moustaches no 2 [The Whiskers, no. 2].

No 43. La Sortie d’une maison de jeu [Leaving a Gambling House].

No 84. Les Bossus [The Hunchbacks].

No 82. Les Nez longs [The Long Noses].

No 81. Les Nez ronds [The Round Noses].

No 73. Les Chantres [The Singers].

No 65. Les Cornes [The Horns].

No 61. Les Aveugles [The Blind].

No 49. Les Petits ramoneurs [The Little Chimney Sweeps].

 

Louis Léopold Boilly (1761–1845), Recueil de grimaces [Collection of Grimaces] (Paris: Chez Delpech, Quai Voltaire no. 23, [1823-1828]). 95 lithographs with gouache highlights. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process. Printed and published at the shop of François-Séraphin Delpech (1778-1825).

See also: https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/2007/11/the_print_shop_of_f_delpech.html

Spirited and Appropriate Illustrations by F.M. Howarth

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired the temperance novel Broken Fetters (1888) along with a four-page prospectus for the book. Publishers Weekly wrote, “A valuable work for those interested in temperance reform movements will be Broken Fetters, by Charles Morris, with numerous realistic and appropriate illustrations by F. M. Howarth…”–September 22, 1888. The title page called them “spirited and appropriate illustrations.”

Franklin Morris Howarth (1864–1908) was in fact not a realistic or appropriate artist but an American cartoonist, best remembered for his comic strips The Love of Lulu and Leander and Mr. E.Z. Mark.

The artist was only twenty-four when he was commissioned to illustration Morris’s temperance novel. He was not especially well-known at the time and it is odd that the illustrations of many artists are included but Howarth was the only one singled out on the title page and in the advertising. Three years later Howarth joined Puck magazine, where he gained national recognition and remained for ten years before he was persuaded to join the staff of The New York World.

An obituary for Howarth ran on September 23, 1908 in Philadelphia’s The Geneva Daily Times:

Frank M. Howarth, a widely known cartoonist, died yesterday morning at his home, 308 High street, Germantown, a suburb of this city, after suffering two weeks from double pneumonia. He was 44 [sic; he was five days short of turning 44] years old. During his early newspaper career Mr. Howarth was connected with the “Call” and “Item”, of this city. Recently he had drawn cartoons for the Chicago Tribune and had engaged in humorius [sic] colored syndicate work, his most noted series being those of “Mr. E.Z. Mark, and “Lulu and Leander.” He was the first artist who ever drew a free hand sketch of the scene of a murder for a newspaper.

Charles Morris (1833-1922), Broken Fetters. The Light of Ages on Intoxication. A Historical View of the Drinking Habits of Mankind, from the Earliest Times to the Present. Especially Devoted to the Various Temperance Reform Movements in the United States … Numerous Spirited and Appropriate Illustrations Drawn Expressly for This Work by the Celebrated Artist F. M. Howarth and Many Others… (Richmond, Va.: H.E. Grosh & Co., 1888). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process

567 choreographed printers

For anyone who has had a printer jam just as a paper copy of something is due, you need to watch the video for OK Go’s “Obsession,” which makes use of 567 choreographed printers. The band is known for their innovative music videos and this one takes place in front of two walls of printers. An introductory note assures viewers that all paper was recycled and the proceeds given to Greenpeace.

The technical team included Daito Manabe and Rhizomatiks Research, and choreography was by Mikiko and Elevenplay. The creative agency was Six.

Last Chance to See Thomas Rowlandson Drawings

All good things must come to an end. Sooner than later if this young wife succeeds in pushing her old husband into his grave.

This is the last weekend to see our collection of Rowlandson drawings, donated in the early twentieth century by Dickson Q. Brown, Class of 1895. Brown also donated nearly two thousand Rowlandson prints and all of the artist’s illustrated books to Princeton University Library. Several books from the collection are also on view, most important The Miseries of Human Life by James Beresford (1764-1840), around which Rowlandson drew many satirical plates.

Thanks to the Princeton University Art Museum for hosting our collection through the fall: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/object-package/miseries-human-life-and-other-amusements-drawings-thomas-rowlandson/112600


The Miseries of Human Life and Other Amusements: Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson

Africa in photogravure

Sir Alfred Edward Pease (1857-1939), Travel and Sport in Africa (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902). Rare Books Off-Site Storage DT12 .P35 1902q

Princeton owns a beautiful three-volume set of Pease’s illustrated journals titled Travel and Adventure in Africa, with his personal photographs along with some by the French photographer Emile Frechon (1848-1921), the English aristocrat Sir Edmund Giles Loder, 2nd Baronet (1849-1920), and the environmentalist Edward North Buxton (1840-1924). Arthur Humphreys arranged to have several dozen printed in photogravure, providing a spectacular record of Somaliland in particular, along with other African locations. The group shown above is only a small selection. Surprisingly few document of killing of animals and focus instead on the people he and his wife met along the way.

“Pease was adventurous,” wrote his editor Peter Hathaway Capstick. “Between 1891 and 1912, he visited Asia Minor, Algeria, Tunisia and the Sahara, Somaliland, Abyssinia, Kenya, and Uganda, hunting wherever he could. He was Resident Magistrate of the Transvaal in Komatipoort, next to present-day Mozambique, from 1903 to 1905, and he worked in the Allied Remount service from 1914 to 1918. A keen explorer and hunter, Sir Alfred also sketched. He went on to write thirteen books embracing subjects as varied as wildlife, a dictionary on the North Riding dialect, and oases in Algeria!”—Editor’s note, The Book of the Lion (1911).

Pease’s epigram on the title page comes from the Latin:

Pone me pigris ubi nulla campis
Arbor a stiva recreatur aura,
Quod latus mundi nebulae, malusque
Jupiter urget.
Pone, sub curru minium propinqui
Solis in terra dominibus negata;
Dulce rideutem. Lalagen amabo,
Dulce loquentem.

Place me where never summer breeze
Unbinds the glebe, or warms the trees;
Whereever lowering clouds appear,
And angry Jove deforms th’ inclement year.
Place me beneath the burning ray,
Where rolls the rapid car of day;
Love and the nymph shall charm my toils,
The nymph who sweetly speaks, and
sweetly smiles.

Façade

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Façade: Twelve original serigraphs in Homage to Edith Sitwell (New York: Abrams; in collaboration with the Pace Gallery, [1966]). Copy 36 of 150. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2008-0019E

Only one serigraph from Louise Nevelson’s portfolio, Façade, Twelve Original Serigraphs in Homage to Edith Sitwell, can be found in the Graphic Arts Collection. It’s called “The Drum” after the Sitwell poem it accompanies. Arne Glimcher financed the elephant folio and arranged for Nevelson to work at Chiron Press with master printer Steve Poleskie and his studio assistant Brice Marden.

“Nevelson was enthusiastic about making the silkscreen prints,” writes Laurie Wilson, “and showed up daily for several months in the winter of 1965-66, producing Façade. Poleskie remembered Nevelson as being ‘easy to work with and very calm, almost mellow.’ He said that though she didn’t talk about Edith Sitwell, whose poetry and person had ostensibly been the inspiration for the prints, ‘she dressed like Sitwell in big hats and a fur coat. She talked a lot with her lyrical voice and seemed to enjoy herself working on the prints.’”

“Nevelson’s modus operandi at Chiron may have started out like other artists, using silkscreen to quickly produce multiple images that would sell quickly [but] after reproducing the silk screens of five photographs from her 1964 show . . . she felt they looked too flat and began to cut them up and collage the parts together into new images. She and Poleskie [seen above] experimented until they figured out how to construct the collaged images on acetate, and then they photographed the result into what would be the final screen from which the twelve different original prints for the portfolio would be made.” —Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow (2016).

 

 

 

See the Work of 184 Students in Hurley Gallery Exhibit

Just off the main lobby in the new Lewis Center for the Arts, where an orchestra might be rehearsing a few feet away from a dance recital, is the Hurley Gallery. There you will find an exhibition featuring the work of 184 current and former students of David Reinfurt’s Graphic Design classes.

The show is organized around three large-scale projections on the walls of the gallery. Each is tied to a specific graphic design class: VIS 215 offers students an introduction to typography, VIS 216 moves onto discrete problems of graphic form, and VIS 415 is an advanced class where students pursue one common and substantial design project for the semester.

“These courses allow Princeton students to explore the graphic design mechanics of how the messages reach them in their immediate environments, whether physical or online,” said Reinfurt. “Information is always designed — it is intentionally planned and given a specific form. Through hands-on assignments, students learn about design by doing it and also talking about it. The range of classes we initiated seven years ago equip students with the communication and production skills to operate within design, as well as apply these to their major area of interest at Princeton and after. Graphic design, without an explicit subject matter of its own, just may be the most liberal of arts.”


According to the program website, many students have gone on to pursue careers in design. Lily Healey, Class of 2013, is currently working in the design department at The New Yorker. Neeta Patel, Class of 2016, has spent the last year as the graphic design fellow at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Phoenix. When graduating, Patel wrote a class-day speech about her time in the Visual Arts Program and was recently featured in Fortune Magazine. Ben Denzer, Class of 2015, is a junior designer at Penguin Books. Nazli Ercan, Class of 2017, is currently a designer for Pin-Up architecture magazine in New York. Bo-Won Kim, Class of 2011, just completed an M.F.A. in graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design.




 

The gallery is open daily 10:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. through December 15; open daily 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from December 16-28 (closed December 22 and 25).

Jerusalem through the Stereoscope

Wretched Lepers Outside of Jerusalem.

 

The Jews’ Wailing place, Wall of Solomon’s Temple, Jerusalem.

Jerusalem through the Stereoscope (New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1896-1908). 81 albumen silver prints with descriptions in six languages on the verso.

The Graphic Arts Collection has added this group of stereos to our already substantial stereo holdings. These photographs show locations in Jerusalem including the Jaffa Gate, the Valley of Kedron and village of Siloam, the pool of Siloam, the Tombs of the Prophets, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Russian Church of the Magdalene, the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, the Garden Tomb (Golgatha), the interior of the Dome of the Rock, and the minbar in the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Masjid al-Aqṣá), among others.

 

A Greek Priest Blessing the Village Children in Ramah, Palestine [below]

The Beautiful Church of the Armenian Christians, Jerusalem [above]

 

Jerusalem Through the Stereoscope is one part of the series Traveling in the Holy Land sold by Underwood and Underwood. Instructions to canvassers selling the sets insist that workers read the book by Dr. Hurlbut that accompanied the series:

“And this year every agent should possess and study carefully our new book, Traveling in the Holy Land, Through the Stereoscope, by Jesse L. Hurlbut, D.D., which accompanies our new tour of 100 stereographs of Palestine. The attitude which Dr. Hurlbut takes to stereoscopic photographs in this book is of great importance to the work of education in general, and especially of immediate importance to ail our men in their work.

In a word, Dr. Hurlbut holds that the representations of places and objects furnished in the stereoscope are not only life-size–as large as the places or objects would appear on the spot–but that these representations serve, when used aright, as the very places and objects themselves, in their power to teach and affect us. In this book, therefore, Dr. Hurlbut treats the stereographs as actual places.

This is the attitude which every agent should come to have toward stereoscopic photographs, not an attitude assumed just for the purpose of selling more, but an attitude conscientiously arrived at after seeing good reasons for it. Dr. Hurlbut gives some of the reasons for his position in the Introduction to his book. This Introduction should be carried by every agent, read and pondered over a great deal. Its conclusions apply to our stereographs of all countries, not Palestine alone.

. . . Let us consider some of the mistakes men are liable to make: Stereoscopic photographs are especially striking and attractive at the first glance, and can be, to a degree, quickly and easily appreciated by any one. Consequently, agents have found that, because of these qualities alone, stereoscopic views can be sold more easily and extensively than any other article. Therefore, many agents have never found it necessary to make any effort to see whether there are higher considerations which can be made use of in selling stereoscopic views. This has been a great mistake.

These men have depended upon the weaker, less important considerations. the striking, amusing, entertaining qualities, etc., to lead people to buy. The most important considerations have in general, not been made use of. The result is that, although the sales have been enormous, still the possibilities of the sale of stereoscopic views have never yet begun to be realized. This must continue to be the case while most agents and people do not appreciate their higher value, nor even know how to use them to get the most from them.”

Die Graphischen Künste der Gegenwart

Theodor Goebel (1829-1916), Die Graphischen Künste der Gegenwart; ein führer durch das Buchgewerbe, (Contemporary Graphic Art, a Leader in the Booktrade). (Stuttgart: Felix Krais, 1895). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process


The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a rare volume edited by Theodore Goebel (1829-1929) presenting 100 specimens of contemporary European printing. It is the first of three volumes Goebel prepared to document the commercial printing industry of the day, featuring Edward Albert’s héliogravure; photogravures by Joseph Albert, F.A. Brockhaus, and O. Felsing,; the Meisenbachtypes of Meissenbach, Riffarth and Company; and so on. This volume has been digitized but the online images in no way compare to the color, texture, or dimension of the original: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433056717493;view=1up;seq=9

A profile of Goebel was published in the May/June 1893 issue of The British Printer to celebrate “the jubilee of his labours in the service of our art.” They note that he trained in numerous cities with various companies, working as “compositeur secondant,” and afterwards as “metteur en pages” in Plon’s celebrated printing office in Paris, followed by Glasgow and London, where Goebel trained with Bradbury & Evans and Edward Taylor.

From 1859 to 1871, Goebel worked as foreman of Ulrich Müller’s printing office in Riga, Latvia, before leaving to become editor of the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst (later absorbed by Deutscher Buch- und Steindrucker (GAX Oversize 2006-0369Q)). The article continues,

“By his thorough knowledge in all the departments of the typographical art—knowledge gained, not by a dry study of books, but by practical experience—by his untiring zeal in collecting everything that was new and was worth knowing, by his keen insight, and not least, by the brilliancy and clearness of his composition, he not only raised the Journal to that height which its founder had always had in view, but enlarged its scope and interests principally by means of his extensive foreign relations.”

It was Goebel who introduced the English Specimen Exchange to German printers and induced so many of them to contribute. This led to his own Graphischen Künste der Gegenwart Ein Fuhrer Durch Das Buchgewerbe. A later volume is already in the collection, described here: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2013/10/17/elucidations-on-a-collection-of-sample-prints-on-strasbourg-special-papers/

 

[Below] E. Ernst (E. Ehrenzweig). Kunstanstalt fur Photogravure, Wien, VIII., Hasplugergasse 3.

[Below] Meisenbach, Riffarth & Co., Graphische Kunstanstalten, Berlin und Munches; Drei Blatter 1) Titelblatt der Firma, Photogravure nach einem Aquarell von A. zick; 2) Portrat; Photogravure nach einem Oelgemalde von E. Rau; 3) Matterhorn vom Gornergrat, Landshaft nach einer photographisches Aufnahme.

[Below] J.B. Obernetter, Kunst-Anstalt fur Light- und Kupferdruck Munchen.

 

Rubáiyát


Over 100 editions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) are listed in the Princeton University Library catalogue. Many have special bindings and illustrations. One of the most unusual was published in September 1905 by Dodge Publishing Company with illustrations by the California photographer Adelaide Hanscom (later Leeson, 1876-1932).

In 1903, Hanscom gathered writers and artists to her San Francisco studio and like Julia Margaret Cameron, dressed and posed them in exotic scenes for her book’s illustrations. Joaquin Miller (the pen name of Cincinnatus Heine Miller, 1837-1913), George Sterling (1869-1926) and George Wharton James (1858-1923) are thanked individually. Charles Augustus Keeler (1871-1937) was not, nor were any of the female models.

Hanscom not only took the photographs but also drew the borders. This edition was first announced in the column “Books and Authors” in the New-York Tribune on August 26, 1905:

Omar Khayyam. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald; with illustrations by Adelaide Hanscom (New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1905). “… my gratitude to Joaquin Miller, George Sterling, George W. James, and others who have rendered valuable assistance in posing for these illustrations …” Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2003-1063N

 

 
Joaquin Miller

 

 

 

 

George Wharton James

 

 

 

George Sterling

 

 

 
See also
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Sonnets from the Portuguese with photographic illustrations by Adelaide Hanscom Leeson (New York: Dodge Pub. Co., [1916?]). Marquand Library (SAPH): PR4189 .A1 1916

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson (1876-1932), Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, Pictorialist Photographer, 1876-1932 (Carbondale, Ill.: University Museum, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1981).Marquand Library (SAPH) TR647 .L415 1981