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Imprint Annotated Bibliography - 2008
204.
David Tatham, "Winslow Homer and the Etching Revival in America,"
Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 2-9.
Though Winslow Homer made all eight of his major etchings during the 1880s, the heyday of the Etching Revival in America, neither he nor his work was considered to be part of that painter-etcher movement. Differences in subject, scale, technique, and mood all played a part. So too did Homer?s practice of adapting images from his recent paintings rather than seeking new subjects, as did most of the movement?s followers including Mary Nimmo Moran whose Solitude of 1880 is contrasted with Homer?s The Life Line of 1884. Strengths that the critic, curator, and connoisseur Sylvester Rosa Koehler found distinguishing in the Moran print had little or no place in Homer?s thinking as a painter and printmaker in the 1880s. Also reproduced in the article are Homer?s Eight Bells (1887); Mending the Tears (1888); Fly Fishing Saranac Lake and Saved (both 1889).
205. James E. Schiele, "The Civil War Artwork of Louis Kurz: An Escape from Realism," Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 10-20.
Louis Kurz (1833-1921), an Austrian immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1848, was known early in his career as a portraitist and landscape artist. Having settled in Wisconsin, his clientele was from the Midwest until his 1880 partnership with Alexander Allison catapulted the lithography firm of Kurz & Allison of Chicago to national prominence with the production of thirty-six ten-stone chromolithographs of significant Civil War battles. This article follows Kurz?s transition from making photograph-like renderings of people and street scenes to creating highly dramatized and imaginative representations of battles a generation after the Civil War. Each of the four Kurz & Allison battle prints described in the article?Battle of Bull Run, Battle of Fredericksburg, The Battle of Gettysburg, and Storming Fort Wagner---is contrasted with an illustration produced shortly after the battle that more realistically displays the action of a particular moment.
Louis Kurz intended to convince his Northern audience, including Union veterans, that the battles were characterized by bravery, unflinching loyalty, dedication to the flag, and, with the rare exception of the Battle of Bull Run, that the Union cause would somehow prevail. To achieve this end he often employed creative imagination not shown by the war artists of the day.
206. Lauren B. Hewes, "Lithographs of the Dubois Family, 1850-1865," Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 21-36.
The German immigrant George Dubois (ca. 1811-1888) arrived in the United States in 1848 and spent the next forty years working as a lithographer in Philadelphia and in the Boston area. He and members of his extended family produced commercial lithographs, reproductive images, book illustrations, and original compositions on stone. A family collection and archive of over one thousand prints, which range in date from 1850 to ca. 1900, is housed at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. This article examines the Dubois family's earliest work up to and including images made during the Civil War by one of the family firms, the Fall River Lithographic Company, Fall River, Massachusetts. The entire Dubois collection is significant because the material it contains helps to expand our understanding of the lithographic printing business in America as it was experienced by one immigrant family.
207.
David Rousar, ?Images of Iron Makers? Pride,? Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn 2008), 2-18.
As the United States expanded into the Old Northwest in the 1840s and 50s, railway building reached a fever pitch. The demand for industrial products, particularly locomotives, gave rise to a spectacular form of advertising that not only described the product offered but also showed the pride of the builders in their company?s technological achievements The result was the creation of a body of large folio, often vividly-colored lithographic cards depicting the best designs in locomotive technology.
The prints were commissioned by large firms such as M. W. Baldwin, Richard Norris and Son, and Boston Locomotive Works, as well as obscure companies like Denmead and Son and Virginia Locomotive and Car Mfg. Co. And some can be directly associated with prominent names in the field, such as Zerah Colburn, Walter McQueen, and Thatcher Perkins. As railway development reached its zenith in the mid 1850s, it created the conditions that gave rise to the ?golden age? of locomotive builders? lithographs. When the economic boom diminished, so did the production of the large format prints, which were replaced by photographs.
208. Nat Case, ?John Bachmann and the American Bird?s Eye View Print, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn 2008), 19-35.
John Bachmann was born in Switzerland around 1814 and died in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1894. John Reps writes, "No finer artist of city views worked in America"; indeed, Bachmann's bird's eye views are unique in the history of American views for their combination of artistic technique inherited from European landscape drawing, in which he was trained and worked in Paris, and his experimental sensibility in constructing his views from vantage points he had never seen. His career saw the transition from one-color stone lithography through multiple-tint-stone techniques into zinc chromolithography, and from printed views as decoration and commemoration to views as promotional and speculative documents. His views reflect not only the changing landscape of New York City and the other cities he drew, including New Orleans and Boston, but the changing landscape of the American print world.
209. James Brust, ?Notes on the Life of James Merritt Ives with a Reappraisal of When He Joined Nathaniel Currier,? Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn, 2008), 36-41.
Even though Currier & Ives remains a well-known term, even today, surprisingly little has been written about the firm's junior partner, James Merritt Ives (1824-1895). In this article, the author combines his research about Ives with newly found family material, including a number of previously unknown photographs of Ives and his family, to present a clearer picture of the man behind the name. Genealogical data is presented, along with a list of all of James Merritt Ives' children. Ives' Civil war service and his community involvement are discussed. And finally, there is a reappraisal of the date that James Merritt Ives first joined Nathaniel Currier, which appears to be earlier than previously thought.
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