America's Greatest Patriots

Assault on Fort Sanders

The Chicago printmaking firm of Kurz & Allison is well known for its production of commemorative prints of American historical scenes. Founded in 1880, the firm's avowed purpose was to design "for large scale establishments of all kinds, and in originating and placing on the market artistic and fancy prints of the most elaborate workmanship." Elaborate they certainly were: the majority of their prints are bright and dramatic, with action throughout the image, though others were of a more restrained character, often issued in black and white. Drawn in a broad, graphic style that developed from Kurz's background as a muralist, their prints have a striking appearance.

Kurz & Allison did a number of prints of Presidents, some as individual portraits and some as family groupings. One can imagine these somber images hanging in the homes of Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a nationalistic statement and also undoubtedly as inspiration for the family.

In 1890, the firm lithographed a print of “America’s Greatest Patriots.” This was a highly patriotic print--“Pro Patria!” bannered at the top--included four Presidential portraits in a setting with ivy, laurel branches, and American flags. The ‘father of his country,’ George Washington, has his portrait at top center, below which is U.S. Grant, flanked by the two assassinated Presidents, Lincoln and Garfield. This print was copyrighted by J.M. Wolfe & Co. and it is not clear why it was issued in 1890, as Garfield had been assassinated in 1881 and Grant died in 1885. Only the first state of the print has the Wolfe name on it, later ones listing only Kurz & Allison.

On September 14, 1901, William McKinley became the third American President to be assassinated, shot in Buffalo, New York. Like all print publishers, Kurz & Allison saw this as an opportunity to make a print which would sell because of this national tragedy. Thus they took the original stone--which they must have kept in their warehouse and which they may have continued to issue since 1890—removed Grant’s portrait and substituted that of McKinley. Now they had the perfect commemorative print, with Washington accompanied by the three assassinated Presidents. A nice example of a ‘recycled print.’

Correcting errors on prints

Carpenter's Emancipation Proclamation
Because prints are printed from a physical matrix made of wood, metal or stone, all of which can be modified (some more easily than others), there are often print variants created by a modification to a matrix for some reason or other. Some of those modifications are because an error was made.

A nice example of this is Charles Fenerich's print of the Washington Monument. The original version of the print misspelled "Washington" as "Wasihngton," but once this was realized, the lithographic stone was correct to spell the city name properly. Early, mistaken versions of prints are often appealing to collectors, but this print was the object of either a complete miscalculation or a scam, for back in 2002 an owner of the first version was trying to convince people his print was worth $2 million! (I wrote about that story in an earlier blog)

This blog was prompted by a close inspection of one of my favorite prints which we just acquired, Francis Carpenter's engraving of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet (shown at the top). This is a print which I have handled probably six or seven times over the last three decades and it wasn't until today that I noticed what is clearly the correction of an error in the engraving.

If one looks closely at the engraving of Lincoln's left foot, one can see the faint outline of a different shape for his boot. The boot seems to have been originally engraved so that it was turned a bit towards Lincoln's right, but the finished engraving has the boot coming fairly straight ahead. This ghost image is the result of the steel plate not being completely smoothed out before it was reengraved with the new boot. One can only speculate why the boot was changed--probably a proof was run off and the boot just didn't look right--but this ghost image is an interesting shadow of the process of making a print like this.

An interesting question is whether this print was ever issued with the original boot. I have checked every image I can find and have not seen one before the correction. It is, of course, possible some were run off and exist somewhere. It would be fun to find one of these sometime, and there would be a premium in value for this "first state" (if it exists), however, I think that value would be well less than $2 million...

Battle of New Orleans

The War of 1812 officially ended on December 24, 1814, when the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent. However, the physical war had one more spasm of violence for word of the treaty did not reach North America until after one of the conflict’s biggest battles. In early 1814, Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to Elba, allowing the British to focus more on their war in North America. One of their major thrusts was to be campaign to capture New Orleans, thus gaining control of the Mississippi River.

In December, 1814, a large naval and military force under Admiral Alexander Cochrane and General Edward Pakenham arrived in the Gulf of Mexico and proceeded to establish a base just south of New Orleans. On January 8, 1815, the British marched against New Orleans, but were repelled by Andrew Jackson and his motley force consisting of militiamen, slaves, Indians and pirates. This great victory, though it did not affect the final outcome of the war, did help build American morale and it catapulted Jackson to a fame which eventually led him to the White House.

The victory caused a sensation around the country, so it is not surprising that an American publisher from Philadelphia, Joseph Yeager, would issue a colorful print of the battle to take advantage of the national enthusiasm over this victory. The print was drawn by William Edward West and engraved by Yeager himself. It was issued within a short period of time after the battle, when the public was eager to get its hands of any graphic image of the famous encounter.

The print shows the battle from behind the British lines in order to highlight the death of General Pakenham, who is shown lying mortally wounded and surrounded by his staff. Among these was General Sir John Lambert who is showing crying into his handkerchief. The battle ranges in the background, with the British shown attacking the American ramparts, from which can be seen two proud American flags.

It is interesting that either because the plate was not selling that well or he felt it needed a bit more “oomph,” Yeager reworked the plate shortly after it was first issued to add extra figures, mostly British casualties.

Of even more interest is the fact that for some reason Yeager again reworked the print, this time changing the figure of Lambert so that he is no longer weeping into a handkerchief, but is instead vaguely pointing to his left. Why this was done is not clear, but it is an interesting example of the “recycling” of prints.

Recycled Union

Last week I described in general terms the notion of recycled prints, where a new print is made from an already existing matrix, the image being modified to some extent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the larger prints were being produced from steel plates, which lasted very well even after thousands of impressions were produced. It was not particularly practical to melt down or totally wipe clean a steel plate, and with the ability of these plates to be reused many times, quite a number of steel plates were kept for years after their first use. Sometimes they were reprinted with little or no change, but other times they would be extensively modified so they could be used for what was a “new” image. One of the most famous examples of this was a print entitled “Union,” which was recycled not just once, but twice.

The first use of the “Union” plate was for an 1852 engraving by Henry S. Sadd after a painting by Tomkins Harrison Matteson. This print was issued to commemorate the Compromise of 1850. That political consensus was seen by many as the resolution of the tempest over the contentious issue of free and slave states that had been tearing the country apart. Matteson’s image was a celebration of this compromise which it was hoped would save the Union.

In Matteson’s painting the individuals involved in the compromise are shown seated in a formal setting. The two major protagonists, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, along with “The Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay are most prominent, shown surrounding a bust of Washington, the former two with their hands on a copy of the United States Constitution. Arrayed around them are other important participants in the compromise, including Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, Sam Houston and Millard Fillmore.

The symbolism of the print is extensive. Liberty blesses the group from above, while in the background the American eagle helps to part curtains to reveal the Utopia that the strengthened Union was seen as now proceeding towards. In the lower right corner Fillmore is shown holding an American shield above the ‘thrown down’ royal crown and scepter, a symbol of America’s struggles of the past. This is a wonderful print celebrating this important agreement in American history.

Alas, despite the print’s hopeful prognosis, the Compromise of 1850 was ultimately a failure, for the issue of slavery and its extension to new states continued to fester, leading within a decade to the secession of 11 states and then in April 1861, the fall of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. This was followed by a swell of enthusiasm in the North for the Union; a popular wave that print publishers were quick to try to ride. A New York publisher, William Pate, saw the possibilities of Henry Sadd’s engraving after Matteson’s image, so he had it reworked to bring it up-to-date for an 1861 issue of “Union.”


Pate had all the pro-Southern faces rubbed out and pro-Northern visages inserted in their stead. John Bell (Tennessee Senator who ran against Lincoln for President), Howell Cobb (of Georgia), W.P. Magnum (of North Carolina), William R. King (of Alabama), and James Buchanan (the previous President who supported slaveholder rights) were replaced by John Wool (Union general), Edward Everett (the orator being an ardent Union supporter), William H. Seward (Lincoln’s Secretary of State), Benjamin Butler (Union General), and Robert Anderson (“hero” of Fort Sumter), respectively. The most important exchange was the elimination of James Calhoun (the great Southern spokesman) and the insertion of Abraham Lincoln in his place.


One of the interesting aspects of this print is that Lincoln is shown clean shaven. (cf. blog on Lincoln and the growing of his beard) The print was obviously issued after the fall of Fort Sumter, as evidenced by the inclusion of the Major Anderson, and by that time Lincoln had already grown his beard. It is likely that the engraver of the first recycled print had begun work shortly after Lincoln’s election and that he didn’t have access to a new image of Lincoln with a beard to base his portrait on. So he would have had to use a pre-bearded print as his source. (As an aside, Sadd is listed as the engraver on all versions of this print, though it was unlikely he made the changes to the recycled versions). At some point after the second version of “Union” was published, a third version was made, with a beard added to Lincoln’s face, creating a double-recycled print.

Recycled Prints

A print is a piece of paper upon which an image was been imprinted from a matrix (such as a wood block, metal plate, or lithographic stone). For antique prints, the part of the printmaking process which needed the most skill, took the most time, and was the most expensive, was the creation of the matrix. Carving a wood block, etching a copper plate, engraving a steel plate, or drawing on a lithographic stone took a skilled artist/craftsman considerable time and effort, and the cost of materials and the draftsman was substantial, usually as much as, if not more than, the cost of the paper, ink and press time.

As discussed in earlier blogs, most antique prints were made for commercial, not artistic reasons, so it was always appealing to a printmaker if there was a way to save time and money in the production of a print. One of the best ways of doing this was to reuse an already existing matrix and so it is not surprising that there are many examples of what I call “recycled prints,” that is, a print made from a previously used matrix.


Sometimes these prints would simply be a second edition with little change made to the matrix. An area of the image might be reworked a bit because of wear, the publisher or date might be changed, a new border added, or the title might be redone. Other times, more significant changes were made to the image, with whole areas reworked. This was sometimes done because the image needed to be corrected, for instance in the prints above where the William Rush water fountain which had been placed in front of the Philadelphia Centre Square Waterworks was added to a later edition of this Birch Print. Sometimes the modification was more extensive, done so that a whole “new” image could be produced for quite a different purpose than that of the original print.

For a wood block, it was not easy to modify the matrix, as the material could not easily be “corrected.” If a wood block needed to be modified, the printmaker would usually carve out a section of the printing surface and drop in a new carved image. This was rather awkward and less than totally satisfactory, so few examples of recycled woodcuts or wood engravings exist.

A metal plate was far easier to modify. The part of the matrix surface to be corrected could be hammered and buffered smooth and then a new image engraved in its place. For copper, as a soft metal, this was fairly easy to do, but even steel plates were reworked in this manner. This plate modification would sometimes leave some evidence of the reworking, with faint, ghost images from the original design evident on the print or a smudged “halo” around the edge of the reworked area.

One of the great advantages of lithography was that it was the easiest method to rework. As lithography is primarily a chemical, rather than physical, manipulation of the matrix, it could be modified quite easily. Sections of an old image could be wiped clear and a new image put in its place, often so cleanly that evidence of the modification was impossible to see.

The study of recycled prints is fascinating. It can be fun to find that the image of a particular print started out its life quite differently. The reasons for the modifications can lend insight into the history of society, of print making, or of politics and other aspects of our past. One of interesting stories of recycled prints is that one can sometimes find anachronistic remainders from the original image which do not make sense unless one understands the history of the recycling.


A variation on recycled prints might be called “recycled images,” which differ from the former in that though the image is taken from an earlier print, it was produced from a completely different matrix. An example of a recycled image was discussed in my earlier blog on allegories of Washington and Lincoln. In this example, in order to create a memorial print in response to Lincoln’s assassination, print publisher William Smith hired D.T. Weist to copy and modify an earlier print by John James Barralet showing the apotheosis of George Washington. The Smith print was a lithograph copy of the earlier Barralet engraving. It is from a different matrix, but it is a directly recycled image.

This print is a nice example of the anachronistic remainders I mention above, puzzling aspects of prints that often make no sense unless one realizes that the images are recycled from earlier prints. For instance, why is there an American Indian weeping at the death of Lincoln, and why are there too few stars on the American shield, and why is there a medal of the Society of Cincinnatus on the tomb? All these things make sense in a print about George Washington, but appear in Smith's print about Lincoln only as anachronistic left-overs from the print's source.

I have always enjoyed discovering and analyzing recycled prints and images and so will make this a regular subject for this blog. Interestingly, Lincoln features prominently in a number of examples of recycled prints. Next week I'll discuss an example where the plate was recycled not just once, but twice!