Were we (are we?) really enlightened?

Nineteenth century Americans and Europeans loved to do comparisons of places, societies and people around the world. 19th century atlases often contained charts showing comparisons of the heights of mountains, lengths of rivers, and so forth. A comparison of cultures was also something which would appear from time to time.

This chart, issued in 1830 by D.F. Robinson & Co. exhibits "the comparative size, population, form of government, and number of square miles, in each of the principal Empires, Kingdoms &c. of the globe." That is an interesting part of this chart, but it is the panel of four scenes at the bottom, showing "the Manner of Building among different Nations according to their Civilization" which is of particular interest.

At the left is shown an Indian Village, the manner of building by the "Savage." This term was not used in the sense of fierce, violent, and uncontrolled, for the Indians looks quite peaceful, despite the appearance of some men with guns (note that a dog is playfully jumping up to this group). Instead, the term was used in the chauvinistic attitude of superiority where the Indian culture was not really "civilized."

Next over is a picture of Canton, showing what is described as a "Half Civilized" culture! This would certainly have come as a surprise to the Chinese (who themselves probably considered western culture as at most half civilized). The notion that the Native Americans were "savages" was one that was long standing, but the chutzpah of calling Chinese culture half civilized a breathtaking. (Actually, I suspect that at least some of our current political figures--not to mention any names--probably continue that belief to this day).

Constantinople appears next as the example of a "Civilized" culture. No argument there...

The chutzpah though continues in the last panel, where Philadelphia is a level up from even "civilized," representing an "Enlightened" nation. Now I love Philadelphia, and in 1830 it certainly was one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, but these labels are not reflections of the actual relative "civilization" of these cultures, so much as a reflection of the self-satisfied and blinkered attitude of the publisher and many western citizens. That is not to say that people from the other cultures (Indian, Chinese, and Turkish) wouldn't have had their own hierarchy with their own civilizations at the top, but this chart does give us a really good look at the attitudes held in the U.S. at the time.

Western prints by Frederic Remington

To browse original prints by Frederic Remington - Visit us at PPS-West.com

Nowhere is the American West to be found more completely illustrated than in the works of Frederic Remington. Born an Easterner in upstate New York on October 1, 1861, he had by age 19, distinguished himself as a football player and pugilist at Yale. Leaving upon his father’s death, he arrived on the western plains in 1880 and found the demanding life to his liking, excelling in the use of the lariat and six-gun. He became friends with the working men of the times, prospected for gold, rode with military troops on campaigns, and roamed such fabled routes as the Santa Fe Trail and Bozeman Road. Remington quickly realized that he was witnessing the end of an era. As he wrote later in Collier’s Weekly: “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever-and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the ‘forever’ loomed.”

Five years later, with his inheritance exhausted and a net worth of three dollars, Remington arrived in New York City packing his voluminous portfolios resolved to break into art and illustration. Initial successes were thin, yet within 18 months editors were seeking him out and his painting, “The Courier’s Nap on the Trail” appeared at the annual exhibition in the National Academy. Within a few years he was recognized as the foremost western illustrator, short story author (Roosevelt preferred him to Owen Wister and Bret Harte) and sculptor of his day. Yet he continued to roam each summer for the increasingly elusive characters of the Old West. Fascinated with and befriended by the Indians, Remington anticipated the last rebellion by the Sioux. Narrowly escaping death in combat in the Badlands, he rushed to the East to document the events for Harper’s Weekly. Remington is unique for his “caught-in-action” style, a legacy of his lack in formal training and its stifling pedagogy--which he could never tolerate. He died in 1909 after surgery for appendicitis, his career at apogee, some 48 well-lived years of age.

There are essentially three types of original antique prints by Remington (there are lots of modern reproductions): magazine and newspaper illustrations, halftone prints sold separately or in portfolios, and original chromolithographs. These prints were all done for commercial purposes; that is, they were created with the intent to be used as illustrations in books or magazines, or for sale to the public to purchase to hang in their homes. They were issued in large numbers, though through attrition the antique Remington prints can be quite scarce.

Newspaper & Magazine Illustrations

The first commercial print after Remington was “Cow Boys of Arizona, Roused by a Scout,” issued in the February 25, 1882 issue of Harper’s Weekly (Remington had two illustrations published previously in college publications). The story is that Remington sent his sketch drawn on wrapping paper to the editors of Harper’s just to see if he could sell his work to the paper. They liked the image, but it was so crude that it had to be redrawn by staff artist W.A. Rogers.

In the next years, Remington sold a few more sketches to this illustrated newspaper, but he got his big break in 1886 when he was commissioned by Harper’s Weekly as an artist-correspondent to cover the U.S. government’s campaign against Geronimo. He never was able to catch up with Geronimo himself, so Remington focused more on “Soldiering in the Southwest,” taking many photographs and making sketches, which upon his return east he turned into illustrations for Harper’s and the magazine Outing. This was the beginning of a very successful career as an illustrator, with Remington providing art work for these and other publications, as well as providing images for books and art portfolios.

Between 1882 and 1913 Remington’s drawings and paintings appeared as original illustrations in seventeen publications. Initially, they were done as wood-engraving, but in the 1890s the publications started to use photomechanical screened halftones instead, so the later Remington illustrations tend to be made by this process. In the early twentieth century Collier’s Weekly and other publications started to reproduce his work as color halftones.
Portfolio Prints

Collier’s thought so highly of Remington’s work (one assume not only a commercial viewpoint, but also artistically), that in 1905 they began to issue color halftones after his paintings in portfolios and as separate prints. These were done in a number of sizes, over a number of years, and with different levels of quality. Interestingly, the early prints were called “Artists Proofs” by Collier’s. Traditionally, this term meant a print was pulled before publication, so the artist could inspect it, but Collier’s was simply using this terms as a selling tool. Collier’s also issued a number of Remington halftone images as separate prints for framing, again in different sizes.
Chromolithographs

The rarest and best quality prints by Remington are chromolithographs. These are images which were printed from multiple lithographic stones, one per color. The first of these were two prints, “Antelope Hunting” and “Goose Shooting,” issued in 1889 in a portfolio entitled Sport: or Shooting and Fishing. This portfolio included fifteen chromolithographs after important American sporting artists of the day, such as A.B. Frost, Frederic S. Cozzens, Frank H. Taylor and R.F. Zogbaum. For Remington to be included in this august group was evidence of his increasing fame.

Just over a decade later, in 1901, a portfolio was issued by R.H. Russell of New York containing eight lithographs based solely on Remington’s work. This set, A Bunch of Buckskins, included folio sized chromolithographs, four of ‘rough riders” and four of Native Americans.

A year later, Charles Scribner’s Sons reissued four prints, which had appeared previously in Scribner’s Magazine, as chromolithographs in a portfolio entitled Western Types.

The last chromolithograph after Remington was a separate print issued in 1908 of “The Last of His Race.” This print is an “oleograph,” which essentially is an elaborate chromolithograph printed using oil based inks on canvas and varnished so as to resemble an oil painting.

Thomas Nast Cartoons

Thomas Nast is one of our favorite artists. He is among the most famous illustrators of all time, often called the ‘father of American political cartooning.’ Nast was born in Bavaria in 1840 and at six years immigrated with his family to the United States. His father, a musician, had enrolled the artistically precocious child in an art school by age 12. Three years later Nast was forced to leave his training to help support the family, fortunately gaining work as an illustrator at Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Five years later Nast had traveled abroad to cover the Heenan-Sayers fight, later joining Garibaldi’s forces in Italy as a war correspondent. He had been employed by the New York Illustrated News for these assignments, but by early 1862 he had become a war correspondent again, this time for Harper’s Weekly. His patriotic themes created such attention that President Lincoln cited Nast as his “best recruiting sergeant”.

During the first 25 years following the War Between the States, Nast became the most significant illustrator of American political and social issues. His pointed cartoons exerted a great impact on public opinion. Every presidential candidate to gain his support won and his stature increased with the successful campaign in 1870-71 to bring down “Boss” Tweed of New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall and his political machine. More than a mere cartoonist, Nast was an innovator of images, popularizing or instituting many now familiar subjects such as the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, John Bull, Uncle Sam, and Columbia. Nast’s Santa Claus, modeled from Clement Moore’s St. Nicholas in his Twas the Night Before Christmas, serves as our present-day jolly old elf. Harper’s Weekly was Nast’s principal forum, and those prints hold a significant place in our American past.

On January 9, 1875, Nast produced a cover illustration for Harper’s Weekly applauding the proposed Specie Resumption Act which Grant had introduced to Congress and which passed just five days later. This had to do with the debate between “hard” and “soft” money proponents. In order the finance the Civil War, the federal government had begun to circulate paper money, “green backs,” which was not backed by gold specie. When the war ended, some wanted to continue with this policy, while others wanted to resume the use of a specie backed currency.
Most Democrats were soft-money advocates, hoping that inflation would be encouraged, so easing to some extent the extensive debt of their constituency, mostly farmers. Most Republicans, including Grant, were hard-money advocates, as were most of their capitalist supporters, and they believed that gold-backed currency would stabilized the money supply and sustained a prosperous economy. In the 1874 elections, the Democrats won enough seats that they were gong to take control of the House of Representatives, so the lame duck Republicans pushed through the Specie Resumption Act in early January, returning U.S. currency to a gold-based system.

Nast’s cartoon strongly backed this Act. Grant is shown standing on the “Ark of State, depicted as a Noah figure reaching out to the Dove of Peace, shown flying over a rainbow entitled “Our Credit.” Strewn behind the ark, floating in a sea of inflation, are the soft-money proponents.

Though the Act passed, the time-table for the retirement of the “green backs” was to take place over an extended period. The Democratic led Congress was not able to kill the act, but they were able to pass the Bland-Allison Act in February 1878, which succeeded in raising the amount of paper money not backed by gold allowed to be in circulation, thus diluting the Resumption Act.

The Republicans and Nast continued to be against this move, so Nast reissued his “Ark of State” cartoon, but this time reinforced his point by adding his own picture and titling the print with "Our Artist Indorsing the Above Cartoon.” Nast is shown sitting by the solid rock of “Sound Specie Basis,” with the quote “I, Th. Nast, A Fellow Workman Want 100 cents on a $ You Bet. Not 90 or 92 cents on a $ in silver, gold greenbacks of soft soap.”
This is all a rather obscure, and now the conflict seems totally out-of-date, but it is interesting to see Nast step into his own cartoons to reemphasize his position. He was a great innovator and print is a fascinating example of his work.

Terra Australis Incognita

I just returned from a wonderful trip to Australia, my visit "down under,” and so I am inspired to write about the mapping of the first “Australis,” Latin for ‘southern,’ to appear on maps, the mythical “Terra Australis Incognita,” that is ‘Unknown Southern Land.’

If you look on many maps of the sixteenth century, you will see a very large land mass covering the southern pole, looking much like the continent of Antarctica. This is really strange, as that continent was not actually discovered until 1820. If that is so, how did what looks to be Antarctica appear on maps from four centuries before? This anomaly has been explained by some (most famously Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings) as being the result of an ancient advanced civilization or by others (such as Erich Von Daniken in Chariots of the Gods) as evidence of a visit to Earth by space visitors in the distant past. The truth, though more mundane, is still of considerable interest.

During the Renaissance, as scholars were trying to get a handle on their world in a period of discoveries of new lands, there were many who supported a theory that there had to be an as-yet-discovered continent in the southern-most part of the globe. This was based mostly on the supposition that there had to be a large land mass in the south to balance all the land in the north.

If you look at a modern map of the world [such as the one above by Daniel R. Strebe] and look all the land other than Antarctica, it is clear that the majority of the land mass is north of the equator. It was thought that if there were not a large, balancing land mass in the southern hemisphere, the globe would wobble or perhaps tip over.

Gerard Mercator was a proponent of this theory and so he included this continent on his world map.

Once one accepted that there must be a hitherto undiscovered land in the south, one tended to read any information about the southern regions as giving shape to this land. So Marco Polo’s report of “Greater Java” was seen as confirmation of this southern continent, and Polo’s “Locac” became the region of Lucach located there, as well as two other locations based on a misreading of Polo, “Beach” and “Maletur.”

The existence of this great southern land was then further confirmed when in 1520 Magellan sailed through the straits thereafter named after him. Magellan sailed between South America and what he called “Terra del Fuego,” which naturally was assumed to be the shore of Terra Australis. Thus it was that maps began to give a firmer shape to that continent.

However, Tierra del Fuego is an island, not part of Terra Australis, as was proven in 1616, when Jacques Le Maire and Willem Corneliszoon Schouten sailed from the Atlantic Ocean, south of Tierra del Fuego, and into the Pacific.

This did not get rid of the notion of Terra Australis Incognito, however, it just necessitated a modification of the shape of that putative continent. Map makers, not wanting to have to re-engrave entire new plates for their maps which had hitherto shown the continent including the northern shore of Tierra Del Fuego, simply erased the shoreline connected to the now-known-to-be island, ending the coast vaguely somewhere in the oceans to the east and west.

Through much of the seventeenth century, as explorations were being made in the southern oceans, new discoveries of land were often initially assumed to be part of Terra Australis-—for instance this was thought at one time for the New Hebrides and Australia—-until this was shown to be incorrect. As these discoveries were reported, parts of the coastline of Terra Australis, which had appeared on maps since the sixteenth century, were more and more erased, so that by the end of the seventeenth century, people were beginning to doubt its existence.

It was one of the greatest scientific cartographers of all time, Guillaume Delisle, who finally decided—-given the total lack of any evidence—-that he would completely remove the continent from his maps. Quite ironic that the person who was most closely following good, scientific principals in mapmaking, ended up making maps which were the furthest from reality.

The hope for a great southern continent continued into the eighteenth century, with James Cook having secret instructions to search for it during his 1768-71 voyage supposedly just to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. On his second voyage, of 1772-73, Cook sailed around the seas so far to the south that he proved that if there were any southern continent, it was much smaller than the original theories suggested. It wasn’t until 1820 that the continent was first actually sighted, with the last of the known continents finally making it onto maps of the world legitimately, rather than as a matter of speculation.

Go to video about this cartographic myth

Mary Arniotis, Strong Woman

One of the fun things about my business is that even after 35 years selling maps and prints, I still come across items which I have never seen and which I get to research and learn about. As part of effort to redesign and update our web site, I started going through some nineteenth century posters we had not really researched. One of these had long puzzled me: it is a poster entitled "Miss Arniotis Champion Lutteuse de Monde" and it shows a young lady in tights standing next to a series of images of her wrestling another woman.

The translation is basically that Miss Arniotis was the world champion at wrestling and that 500 francs were offered for anyone who could stay in the ring with her for 15 minutes. What was all this about?

By doing a bit of digging, I was able to find out that Mary Arniotis was a "strong woman" who was appearing on stage in Paris in the mid-1890s, doing a show which showed how strong she was. This included such feats as lifting two men sitting on a barrel with one hand and lifting a table with a man standing on it just using her teeth!

According to the press articles in 1894, "She does not claim to possess any supernatural or otherwise magnetic power, but says she puts her trust solely in her muscle....Her strength is the result of a careful attention to hygienic laws. She has a matchless figure and is the essence of suppleness and very graceful."

Another article noted that "When she appears on the stage any member or members of the audience is at liberty to put her strength to test in any way that he may choose." Turns out this wasn't always the best idea for "She took one luckless youth by the nape of the neck and slammed him into an empty barrel, which she then used as a baseball, scaring the life out of the fellow as she tossed him into the air, all this because the man said he thought she was but a trickster."

Later in the decade, Mary Arniotis, came to the U.S. and appeared in a number of vaudeville shows, but the poster I was researching was from her time in Paris. This poster was to drum up business for her performances, promising 500 Francs to anyone who would stay wrestling her for 15 minutes. Posters, such as this one, were produced in great numbers to be posted in Paris for various events and given their ephemeral intent and the fragility of paper, few of this sort of poster survive to today. I can find no other posters related to Miss Arniotis so I am especially pleased one turned up here and I was able to figure out its fascinating history.

Houghton's Diagram of the History of Political Parties in the United States, by Vincent Szilagyi

In our line of work we deal with relics of the past that were created to meet some pressing need, be it scientific, cultural, financial or artistic. Sometimes the forces that made these prints important have faded with time, rendering them charming, but somewhat bland, pieces of history. Yet, often the reverse is true, where the events and feelings of today give a deep and often urgent sense of importance to parts of our collection. This is certainly true of this next print.

This marvelous chart, entitled “Plate VI. Diagram of the History of Political Parties in the United States”, is the work of American historian Walter R. Houghton. Houghton was a teacher, author and historian of politics and religion at Indiana University. In 1880 he issued a short work, Conspectus of the History of Political Parties and the Federal Government, expanded and issued over the next several years as History of American Politics (Non Partisan.). This work was the first really detailed look at the subject and its insights are of interest even in today’s world of very partisan politics. The most impressive and influential aspect of Houghton’s work is this chart which showcases the “History of Political Parties in the United States”. Although overwhelming at first glance, the chart is actually quite straightforward and easy to understand. Houghton shows American political history from before the Revolution until 1880 through the lens of political parties, with presidential terms indicated with vertical lines. Each political party is shown as a line, with the thickness or thinness of the line indicating its level of support. The political party that controls the presidency is on top, while the other party (or parties) is below. The party lines splinter and merge often, with various issues causing groups of people to leave one party and join another, or start one of their own. Houghton indicates the reasons for these departures with descriptive text, which briefly explain what fissures drove people to seek new parties.

In our hectic election season we are bombarded with claims that we are hopelessly divided by party, ideology and the breakdown of civil society. While hyperbole might sell papers and fill airtime, the struggles of today cannot hold a candle to the chaos of the 1850s and 60s, as Houghton’s chart perfectly illustrates. The years leading up to the Civil War is where the party lines veer from a mostly simple two party system to a tangle of competing vines. This accurately captures the political chaos of the period, where the struggle over slavery obliterated the Whig Party and severed the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern wings. New Parties like the Free Soilers, Native American [Know Nothings] and Silver Gray eventually coalesced around opposition to the Kansas Nebraska Act, and formed the Republican Party. A few years later, a reconstituted Democratic Party emerges from the union of former Confederates and Northern Democrats and the chart returns to a more simplified give and take between two major parties. People still splinter off and join the opposing Party, but this basic configuration of Democrats and Republicans remains even today, despite some occasional third party challenges over the years.

In light of our current political climate, studying this chart gives us a healthy and much needed dose of perspective. While we certainly have room for improvement, we are a far cry from the rhetoric and vitriol that tore apart all but a precious few American institutions 150 years ago. This marvelous chart is a fantastic tool for viewing America’s political history, as well as a beautiful piece of Americana.

Africa’s Shifting Regions by Vincent Szilagyi

Antique maps of Africa are an excellent choice for both novice and expert map collectors. Maps of Africa show wonderful (albeit often inaccurate) detail. The relatively late exploration of the continent by Europeans and the ever-changing colonial boundaries mean that maps only a few years apart can show vastly different pictures of the continent. Maps of Africa are also less in demand than some other areas of the world, allowing people to acquire great pieces of history and art at very reasonable prices. One of the interesting things about maps of Africa is the relatively fluid use of terms describing regions and states. A term used for one area on a 1770s map can be found referring to a wholly different region thousands of miles away on a 1780s map and so on up until quite recently. There are quite a few of these terms, many of which appear briefly and then disappear or were only used by one cartographer. However, there are four regional terms that had significant staying power through the years and through the coming and going of different cartographic minds. These terms defined Africa for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years, and are still found on maps today. Many should be familiar even to those without much knowledge of African history; they are Guinea, Congo, Ethiopia and Libya.

Guinea (or Guinee, Guiney)

Map of Guinea by Herman Moll, 1727

Map of Upper and Lower Guinea by Andriveau-Goujon 1838 (Courtesy of davidrumsey.com)

Guinea is a name still found on African maps today. In addition to the Republic of Guinea, the countries of Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea share the name of this ancient region. (The island of New Guinea in Oceania is also named after this region, as is Papua New Guinea, the country on its eastern half.) In general, Guinea historically referred to the West African region bordering the Gulf of Guinea. However, some maps show Guinea extending along the entire Atlantic African coast, while others have a small confined Guinea near what is now Ghana and the Ivory Coast. There wasn’t a great deal of consistency in the placement of Guinea beyond this, and it was mostly used as a catchall for West Africa. Later, Guinea was divided into Lower Guinea in the North and Upper Guinea in the South. As the colonial race went on, Guinea became less and less used as other names took precedence. As such, by the end of the 19th century, Guinea disappeared as a region and was replaced by terms like West Africa or the names of the various British and French colonies in the region.

Kongo (or Kongo)

1848 manuscript map by Marianne Hunt showing the Congo (Courtesy of davidrumsey.com)

The Congo is another old name, stemming from the Kingdom of the Kongo that interacted with the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries. Starting with the Portuguese, European maps began to place the label “Congo” in a variety of places. Simply put, the Congo referred to anywhere within the Congo River drainage basin. While this explanation seems fairly straightforward, for most of Africa’s history mapmakers had no idea where the Congo River actually went. Many geographers thought it was connected to the Nile or the Niger, while others thought it connected to the Zambezi. This confusion resulted in the “Congo” being anywhere in a vast region that covered the entirety of Central Africa from the Sahara to the Zambezi and from the Atlantic to an ill-defined border in the East. Over time, as the region was mapped, the Congo began to refer specifically to the colonial holdings of King Leopold II, which occupied the modern territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. In addition to the DRC, the Republic of the Congo is also named after this region and river.

Libya (or Libye)

Reconstruction of the World as described by Herodotus

Libya is a region inherited from Roman and Greek geographers. To most geographers, Libya was a shorthand for the entirety of desert North Africa. While certain regions like Egypt and Mauritania had their own names, they were considered part of the greater Libya region. In fact, on several maps the term Libya is used as a synonym for Africa as a whole. This was the standard for centuries, until the Age of Exploration when Portuguese and Spanish sailors determined that Africa was much, much larger than previously thought. As this European penetration of Africa moved the frontiers of geographic knowledge further and further from the coast, Libya expanded inland. Libya became the lands between the Mediterranean and Guinea. The entire Sahara was often called Libya, among other names. As the centuries progressed, Libya eventually took on a second meaning, the land of light-skinned Africans. Libya was the land of the non-black Africans: the Arabs, Copts and Berbers. Another familiar term was used for the parts of Africa inhabited by black-skinned peoples.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia was the land of black-skinned Africans. The term comes from the Ancient Greek term Aethiopia (Burnt-Faces) which was first mentioned by Homer in the Iliad. Later Aethiopia was described by Herodotus as the farthest region of "Libya" (i.e. Africa): "Where the south declines towards the setting sun lies the country called Aethiopia, the last inhabited land in that direction. There gold is obtained in great plenty, huge elephants abound, with wild trees of all sorts, and ebony; and the men are taller, handsomer, and longer lived than anywhere else." As time went on and more of Africa became mapped, Ethiopia moved frequently. At times, Ethiopia was all of Africa below the Sahara. At other times, Ethiopia became more closely related to the modern day Ethiopian Highlands. This area was also called Abyssinia. It is not unusual to see Ethiopia and Abyssinia on the same map, often in very different places.

When looking at maps of Africa, some or all of these our terms will almost always be present. Even though they have been used for centuries and into the present day, just because a term is familiar, does not mean you will know where to find it.