Nature Printing

In previous blogs I have described the three major types of printmaking processes: relief, intaglio and planographic. Today I will talk about an uncommon process, “nature printing.”

Nature printing is not a single process, but includes any printmaking procedure where actual natural specimens—such as a plant or insect— are used to make prints. The earliest known attempt at nature printing was by Leonardo da Vinci who printed images of plants by inking the plants and then pressing them by hand onto the paper. This process was used infrequently into the eighteenth century, but proved generally unsatisfactory because of the problems of getting uniform impressions and wear on the specimens, which limited the number of prints possible.

In the nineteenth century a new approach was tried, where the specimen was not used directly to make the print, but instead it was used to make a printing plate of wood or metal, from which the print was then made. The most practical process was developed in 1853 by Alois Auer in Vienna. It involved laying the item to be illustrated on top of a plate of soft lead. The specimen was then covered with a hard steel plate, and this sandwich was run through an intaglio printing press. The pressure forced the image of the specimen into the soft lead. The ink could then be applied to the lead plate and prints made from this. It was also possible to transfer the image to a copper plate by electrotyping and a reverse plate made from that for printing.

This process was most successfully used by Henry Bradbury, who used it to produce large nature prints for Ferns of Great Britain & Ireland in 1855 and The Nature-printed British Sea-weeds in 1859-60. These images are not only very decorative, but each print precisely and delicately traces the image of the plants, capturing the detail of nature itself almost “first hand.” Another interesting example of nature printing was Sherman F. Denton’s use in 1900 of actual butterfly wings to make the prints for As Nature Shows Them: Moths and Butterflies of the United States. Denton created the prints by pressing wings into the pages. He recorded that he had to collect over 50,000 insects in order to produce his work!

It is interesting that towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence in interest in nature printing, resulting in the formation of the Nature Printing Society in 1976. You can read more about this society and nature printing on their web site.

The paper of old prints

In previous blogs I have looked at the subject matter which appears in old prints, as well as the processes used to make them. Another important aspect of old prints is the paper upon which the impressions are made, so today we’ll take a look at this subject.

Prints have been made on papyrus, vellum, silk and other materials, but the vast majority of antique prints are made on paper. The quality and content of the paper has varied considerably over the years. Until the nineteenth century, paper was almost exclusively made from rags (primarily cotton or linen) which were soaked and stirred in vats until the fibers separated into a pulpy mixture that could be used to make sheets of paper. In the nineteenth century, wood pulp paper was developed, which used wood fibers. The wood pulp was created either by mechanical means (first developed about 1840) or shortly thereafter by chemical processes.

Rag paper is still being made but today the majority of paper is made from wood pulp, which is easier and less expensive to produce. Rag paper, however, is significantly superior. The fabric fibers are longer than wood fibers, which makes rag paper stronger. Also, wood pulp paper is usually acidic, which causes it to deteriorate over time, and also it contains significant amounts of lignin, which reacts to light and oxygen by yellowing. Rag paper is naturally non-acidic and it will last without deterioration as long as it is properly handled. This is, of course, why prints that are hundreds of years old are frequently found on almost pristine paper, while prints that are less than a century old are often brown and brittle.

There were two general types of processes used to made the paper pulp into sheets of paper. The first process creates what is called “laid paper.” Laid paper is made by the paper pulp being poured into a mold made of a wooden framework with a wire mesh on the bottom. Laid paper was made by hand and the size of the sheets limited by the practical size of the wooden mold. The way that laid paper can be recognized is by the pattern that is impressed into the paper by the wire mesh. If you hold up a sheet of laid paper to the light, you can see the pattern of the wires (called chain lines), which usually will have very closely spaced lines with crossing lines at wider intervals.

The fact that the wire mesh makes a pattern in laid paper led paper makers to attach wire designs, such as crests, dates or intials, to the mesh. This creates a matching design in the paper, called a “watermark,” and this can be used to help determine the date or manufacturer of the paper used in a print. It should be noted, however, that fake chain lines and watermarks can be put into sheets that are not actually laid-paper.

The other main type of paper is “wove paper.” This is mechanically-made paper, where the pulp is formed into paper on a woven belt. Wove paper, therefore, lacks chain lines. Though wove paper was invented in the eighteenth century and laid paper is still produced today, as a rule of thumb it can be said that the majority of prints made prior to 1800 are on laid paper and the majority of prints made subsequently are on wove paper.

Often when talking about a print, a size description will be used. These can be fairly simple, as in “octavo,” “quarto,” or “folio,” or they can be more complex such as “16mo.,” “royal octavo,” “large quarto,” “double folio,” and other similarly confounding phrases. Unfortunately, there is no standard definition of the sizes of antique prints and this can lead to considerable confusion. You can, however, achieve some understanding of these size idioms by learning the origin of the expressions.

The phrases used to describe print sizes originally applied to bound volumes and have since been derivatively bestowed on prints. In the earliest days of printing, the largest volumes produced were made from single sheets of hand-made paper folded once, thus making two leaves, or four pages. These are called "folio" volumes, after the Latin folium, meaning leaf. Volumes made with sheets of paper folded twice, creating four leaves, are called "quarto"; those made with thrice folded paper, forming eight leaves, are called "octavo"; those made with sheets folded four times, producing 16 leaves, are called "16mo."; and so on. This sounds simple enough, except for the fact that the size of sheets of paper varied considerably, creating an equal variation in the size of a folio or quarto or octavo book. Indeed, some quarto volumes are actually be bigger than some folio volumes made from different sized paper.

These book terms have, by common use, been transferred to paper and thus to prints. A folio volume is made from sheets of paper folded once, so a folio print is half the size of a full sheet of paper, and likewise a quarto print is one quarter the size of a full sheet, an octavo print one eighth size, and so on. A print made from an unfolded sheet of paper is called a "double folio" print.

Many prints were made which do not fit neatly into these size categories. Not all prints were made from a sheet of paper to a particular fraction size, and other prints were made from rolls rather than from sheets of paper. Prints which were bound into books often vary in size because of the binders’ propensity to trim pages prior to gilding the ends, and of course there is the issue of different sizes of the sheets of paper. It is helpful that some paper sheets have names for their specific size, so that the prints made from these sheets can be unequivocally identified. For instance, the prints from John James Audubon’s The Birds of America are “double elephant-folio,” those from his work The Quadrupeds of North America are “imperial folio,” and those from the octavo editions of both works are “royal octavo.” Where there is no specific name for the sheets of paper used, general expressions such as "small folio," "medium quarto" or "large octavo" are sometimes used to give a more accurate description of size.

Understanding the history and nature of the paper used in making prints is important, but all these factors make this a fairly complex subject. There are the general rules of thumb, such as the fact that most prints made before 1800 will be on laid paper and most made afterwards on wove paper, but the best thing is to try to build as much experience looking at paper of prints where you know the history of the paper. An experienced dealer or collector can often give an approximate date for a print, or determine the originality of a print, by examining the paper and this is something which it is useful to try to learn for anyone interested in old prints.

“Original woodblocks” by E.M. Washington: an art scam

Some time ago, an what seemed to be an exciting find appeared on the market, a collection of woodblock prints from the estate of an unknown printmaker, Earl M. Washington. At the time, this find was described as follows:

Earl M. Washington (1862-1952) was an African-American master wood-engraver and printer who between the early 1900s and the time of his death had amassed and printed from one of the largest collections of artists' wood blocks in the United States. Washington's career began at the age of 13, when he was apprenticed at a Southern printing shop. In 1880 Washington moved to New York, but encountered racial and social prejudice which barred him from employment at the larger printing shops in the city. Eventually finding a position in a small shop on the Lower East Side, Washington went on to perfect his skills as a master printer.

Washington's collection of wood blocks began accidentally, with blocks collected from the fire-ravaged print shop of a fellow-carver and friend. As he continued his printing work, Washington's circle of acquaintanceship widened, and he began to receive blocks from many different artists and publishers. These included the work of Hale Woodruff, (1900-1980) whom Washington met and befriended; Eric Gill, Lynd Ward, Rockwell Kent, M. C. Escher, Robert Gibbings, and others. Washington printed impressions for each of the wood engraved blocks in his collection, and in some instances, he used the designs of other artists to create new engraved blocks.

It turns out that this "find" was the result of an elaborate scam perpetrated by this printmaker's supposed great-grandson, also named Earl M. Washington. The evidence is overwhelming that even if the first E.M. Washington did exist and was a printmaker (both uncertain), he was neither the maker nor printer of these prints. Instead it is clear that the maker of these prints is the current E.M. Washington, who made "original" woodblock copies of prints by the famous printmakers who were supposed to be the friends of his alleged great-grandfather. Each of these prints is signed "E.M. Washington," which though said to be by the great-grandfather is certainly the signature of the great-grandson, and they are dated with dates when they were supposed to be printed, a clear misrepresentation.

The current E.M. Washington has spent a lot of time and effort (and I believe still does) marketing these prints to print dealers and at auction (they still come up on ebay). The story changes regularly, but usually the prints are misrepresented as being something that they are not and inappropriate prices are asked or suggested.

Although these prints were created as part of a scam and do not have the value they might have were the story true, their history is fascinating. This makes the prints interesting and thus some value (not to mention that the images are quite attractive). The eagerness with which they were initially accepted speaks to the growing modern interest in the work of early African-American artists and artisans. Though we know now that they are not what they seemed, these prints are still very good "original" copies of some very fine wood block prints, especially those of African-American figures and subjects. They are lovely images and fun to own, as long as you acquire them knowing what they are and for an appropriate price.

Charles Rand Penney

Today is the 86th birthday of "Uncle Charlie". What makes this relevant to this blog is that my Uncle Charlie is Charles Rand Penney, who put together one of the finest antique print collections of the twentieth century.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1923, Charles Penney acquired his BA from Yale University in 1965, a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951, and in 1995 he was honored with a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the State University of New York for his life-long support for the arts. Charlie began his interest in collecting art in 1934 when he was given a watercolor by artist Robert Blair, his Sunday school teacher. Over the years, his collecting interests expanded until he had put together 100 collections! These ranged from the art of Western New York to World's Fair and Exposition souvenirs, from Staffordshire figures to coat hangers, and from quilts to Mr. Peanuts memorabilia.

Charlie’s collections grew in size and quality, as well as number, and by the 1960s he had completely devoted his life to his collections, which by then had received national and international recognition. He not only collected, but Charlie become a major donor to various institutions around the country. This culminated with the donation of his Western New York art collection to the Burchfield Art Center. This donation included paintings, sculpture, craft art, Roycroft objects, and 184 works by Charles E. Burchfield. In recognition of this tremendous donation, as well as his on-going support of the arts, the Burchfield Art Center was rededicated as the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in 1994.

Charlie’s interest in Western New York made it natural that he would collect prints of the region, including many views of that most iconic of American images, Niagara Falls. When I first went into business in 1982, Charlie and I talked about his print collection and we agreed that it would be wonderful to focus on prints of Niagara Falls and to try to put together a world class collection. For over a decade, Charlie and I searched for every printed image of the Falls we could find, adding them to the collection and documenting their history. When, in 1993, this collection went on display at the Castellani Art Museum, it was clearly the largest and best collection of these views ever assembled.

Collecting is definitely in Charlie's blood (and some of those genes seem to have reached me as well), but Charlie is more than simply a collector. He is scholar and a supporter of research and documentation of his collections. Over the years he has issued numerous catalogues of his collections and along these lines, he commissioned me to produce a complete documentary listing of his print collection and thematic analysis of the subject of Niagara Falls prints. The result was the catalogue Impressions of Niagara, which with its supplement is still the most comprehensive listing on the topic . Furthering his goal of making his collections available to scholars and researchers, Charlie arranged, partly through a generous gift, for the Niagara Falls collection to go to the Castellani Art Museum, where it now resides. [Click here to visit the collection's web site]

In my mind, Charlie is the consummate collector. He pursued every possible avenue to add items to his collections and worked tirelessly to gather and organize information on those collections. He also approaches his collecting, as he does life in general, with unbounded passion. I like to think I am enthusiastic about antique prints, but I don’t hold a candle to Charlie. The joy and gusto with which Charlie seeks and learns was an inspiration to me when I was first starting out and I still always feel recharged when I spend time with him talking about his prints, his sculptures, his African masks, or whatever. He turns 86 years young today and I am grateful that I have been able to work with him and know him for over half those years.

American Historical Print References

One of the most popular, and valuable, types of antique prints are American historical prints. These include images of battles, portraits of important figures, and historical allegories. From the eighteenth century and into the early twentieth, historical prints have been published related to almost every American historical event or person and this provides a fertile field for collectors or those simply interested in American history. Luckily there are a number of excellent references which cover these prints. There have been many published on particular individuals (e.g. Lincoln) or particular events (e.g. the Civil War), but there are also some fine references that are more general. Today I will discuss those I would recommend in particular to those interested in the subject. A couple of these works are out-of-print, but can be found on the internet or in good libraries.

Political prints form one of the largest types of historical prints and luckily there is a terrific book which documents this type of print based on the collections in the Library of Congress (which has the largest collection of such prints in the world). This is Bernard F. Reilly’s American Political Prints. 1766 – 1876. This wonderful book documents and illustrates the thousands of political prints in the LoC, each entry including an insightful analysis of the subject matter of the print. This is a good thing, as many of the political events/personalities depicted are now quite obscure and the symbolism not readily understandable to us today. The work begins with a Paul Revere engraving from 1766 related to the Stamp Act and ends over 600 pages later with a pro-Democratic campaign cartoon from 1878. This book is currently out of print.

Portraits of U.S. Presidents have been popular since Washington, with individual prints and series produced in engravings and lithographs of all sizes and quality. Noble E. Cuningham’s excellent Popular Images of the Presidency from Washington to Lincoln is the standard work on the topic. It documents and illustrates a wide range of Presidential prints, putting them into the context of their historic period and the history of print publishing.

E. McSherry Fowble’s Two Centuries of Prints in America 1680-1880 is an insightful documentation and analysis of prints from the Winterthur Museum Collection. It covers many more types of prints than simply historical ones, but there are many on this topic included and the descriptions of the prints made both in Europe and America explain the prints and put them into the wider context of American history and culture. This book is currently out of print.

These are an excellent place for someone interested in American historical prints to start. Beyond these, most of the print references are about specific topics and of these are there many terrific ones. This is a field of research that is booming and each year seems to produce a new crop of fine references. I'll be discussing new publications as they appear.

Prints: Art for a Down Economy

This week I am in France on vacation (yeah!), so I've asked Kelli Lucas for another of her interesting blogs. Here it is:

I've been doing some research lately on twentieth century print clubs and have noticed that, though some of these groups were born in the midst of the heady 1920s and survived past the prosperity of the 1950s, their heyday really took place during the spare decades of the 1930s and 1940s. During years when artists needed to sell things and consumers needed to buy things cheaply, prints became the darling of the art world. Looking at the clubs and societies that flourished in those decades is giving me a little insight into long-term popularity of prints and--perhaps--a bit of wisdom for art collectors weathering the current economy.

Since the invention of the printing press, one of the most attractive features of prints has been their inherent accessibility. Produced at a smaller scale than most paintings and in greater numbers, they are inherently easier to possess and display and more affordable than paintings or sculpture. The link, though, between those who make prints and those who would buy them is rarely self-evident; that is, the average, middle-income art collector is not always in direct contact with the average, eager-to-sell etcher or lithographer. Enter the print club.

Print clubs and societies have taken various forms over the last two centuries, but they have had at their core one goal: the introduction, in varying degrees, of consumerism to art (and art to consumerism). Chris wrote earlier about the American Art Union, which was really the first such organization in the United States. As the Etching Revival gained steam in the late nineteenth century, groups rose up to support a new generation of printmakers, artists whose primary medium was prints rather than paintings or sculpture. These decades really became a golden age for print clubs, with popularity that peaked during the 1930s. As disposable income plummeted during the Great Depression, artists needed a way to sell their work and collectors needed a way to buy it in such a way that would maximize benefit for both.

In New York City, Reeves Lewenthal opened a gallery called Associated American Artists, commissioning artists for $200 to produce editions of prints that would sell to the public for $5 per piece. To this day, Associated American Artists prints can be found in print shops and print collections across the country and represent work by such fine printmakers as John Steuart Curry, Frank Bishop, Grant Wood, and others. Other groups, like The Woodcut Society, adopted a subscription structure.

The Woodcut Society was established in 1932 by print enthusiast Alfred Fowler to promote the appreciation of woodcuts and help provide opportunities for American woodcut artists. The society issued 44 prints between 1932 and 1954, some by the best artists of the period. For an annual subscription fee, members were entitled to receive a print from editions of 200, mounted inside a letterpress printed folder with an artist's foreword or critic's essay. Ready to be framed, the prints could also safely be kept in their folder of issue, making the woodcuts they contained even more affordable (as they did not require elaborate, immediate display mounts).

The subject matter addressed by Woodcut Society artists was a wide mix, mainly presented in a representational style. Some artists dealt with Regionalist topics, including men at work in rural settings. Others addressed classical themes like the female nude and still life. Landscapes from New England to Arizona also appeared over the years, as did animals, domestic and wild.

Accessibility was the name of the print club game then, and, to a great extent, still is. The prints from such societies have become highly collectible, depending on the artist, but many are still affordably priced. Though we (of course) are biased toward antique prints, there are still clubs that exist in the same fashion as the Woodcut Society: annual membership dues get you access to some really fine prints. Locally, Philagrafika is doing fine work, but these organizations are thriving across the country. The lesson to learn from the Depression-era print clubs, in my opinion, is that collecting art is not an inaccessible luxury limited to flush economic times. Even when budgets are tight, it is possible to seek and find good art, and chances are that when you start looking, you'll find what you're looking for in a print.

The Zeno Map: mythical islands of the North Atlantic

In 1558, Nicolo Zeno (1515-1565) published De I Commentarii del Viaggio, which purported to be the story of the travels of Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, ancestors of the publisher, based on a fragmentary document that had come down in the family. The account told how in the late fourteenth century the Zeno brothers had sailed, in the employ of Henry Sinclair, the Earl of Orkney, to Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere in the North Atlantic. Two islands they supposedly visited were Frisland (on the way to Greenland) and then Icaria (somewhere past Greenland). Also, purportedly, they had heard a report by a fisherman that he had visited lands to the west of Greenland, called Estotiland and Drogeo, and the Zenos may have sailed in search of these lands.

The account was accompanied by a map showing these islands/lands and it caused something of a sensation when it was published. Today there is debate as to whether the brothers made some or any of the alleged voyages, but the consensus is that the account was wholly fabricated by Nicolo in order to try to prove that it was his Venetian ancestors, not the Genoese Columbus, who had first landed in the New World. Though a fictional tale, the story and particularly the map had a great impact in the subsequent mapping of the Northern Atlantic.

In 1561, shortly after Zeno’s original publication, Girolamo Ruscelli issued a version of the Zeno map, showing all these fabricated places. The non-existent islands of Frisland and Icaria are shown just below Iceland, and further to the south are Estotiland and Deogeo. These latter are drawn running to the edge of the map, indicating that they might be part of the North American continent. [Click here to see labeled image of the Ruscelli Zeno map] The geography of the Zeno map was picked up by other important cartographers, including Gerard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. The former showed these fictional lands on his great world map of 1569 and even included an inset map of the non-existent Frisland on his map of the North Pole (cf. images below), while Ortelius produced a map of the North Sea that was a somewhat augmented version of the Zeno map (cf. image at top of blog). With these two heavy-weights lending their authority to the Zeno myth, it is not surprising that this geography persisted for some time before it was taken off the map.

It is a very interesting case study to see how the Zeno myth had subsequent impact on future exploration and mapping. In 1576, Martin Frobisher, looking for the Northwest Passage, sailed to Iceland, then Greenland, and then up into the Labrador Sea, finally reaching what is now Frobisher Bay in Baffin Island. The problem was that Frobisher was looking at a map based on Mercator’s 1569 cartography, which included the non-existent Frisland, and thus Frobisher didn’t realize where he was. When he had arrived at Greenland, he looked at his map and figured he had landed on Frisland (he actually claimed Frisland for Queen Elizabeth!), and so when he got to Baffin Island he figured he was at Greenland. So, his report of what he saw on Baffin Island was ascribed by mapmakers to Greenland.

The confusion went further, however, for when Frobisher sailed into what is now Frobisher Bay, he thought he was sailing into a strait, not a bay. Thus, after Frobisher returned with the report of his exploration, mapmakers put a strait (not the correct bay) at the end of Greenland (not correctly on Baffin Island). So here we have one cartographic myth, Frisland, creating another such myth, Frobisher’s Strait at the tip of Greenland!