Views of the Rocky Mountains from Denver

I have recently signed up for a six day, 442 mile bike ride through the Rocky Mountains, called Ride the Rockies, This obviously necessitates a lot of training! Towards that end I am doing a 25 mile loop three days a week that takes me up to the Cherry Creek State Park, which has an elevated position to the southwest of Denver. Because of this, I get a terrific view of the Rocky Mountains that changes every day (that is part of downtown Denver at the right of the photo above). I do my ride at dawn, so I often have the sun bathing the Rockies with glorious light, giving me a boost of enthusiasm to keep up my training.

In any case, the view of the Rockies, from approximately the location of Denver, is one that has inspired a number of artists over the years, so there are some very nice prints which show it. Today's blog will look at a few of these.

The first print is entitled “View of the Rocky Mountains on the Platte 50 Miles from their base.” This was engraved by F. Kearney after a drawing by Samuel Seymour and issued in 1822. This is considered to be the first depiction of the Rocky Mountains based on a first-hand drawing.

Seymour accompanied Major Stephen Long’s expedition to the Rockies in 1819-20. The expedition came down the South Platte, passing by the future site of Denver, and Seymour made a number of drawings of what is today Colorado. This view was drawn on July 4, 1820 from a position just to the north of Denver. The view shows South Boulder Peak, Green Mountain and the site of today’s Boulder. While not exactly the same as my view of Denver, it is very similar.

Seymour’s scene shows the plains along the base of the Rockies as completely undeveloped. This changed radically four decades later, with the Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1858-60, when Denver and Golden were established in this area. Still, the land along the foothills was relatively undeveloped and the area was definitely the American frontier. This was the feeling that Worthington Whittredge wanted to show in his view of “The Rocky Mountains.”

Whittredge was a well-known landscape artist from the mid-west who traveled to the American West with General John Pope’s expedition of 1866. About 1870, Whittredge produced a painting, “Crossing the Ford, Platte River, Colorado,” based on sketches he made during this trip. The scene shows the ford on the Platte, essentially at Denver, with an Indian settlement along the banks of the river and the Rockies in the distance. No evidence of Denver or any other gold rush impact is seen, for Whittredge was interested in a natural western scene, not in the changes being wrought by the flood of Americans from the east.

This painting fit the image that Americans wanted to have of the Rockies, so it because very well-known and was reproduced twice in print. First it appeared as a wood engraving in Leslie’s Weekly in 1869, and then in 1872 in Picturesque America as a steel engraving.

The same year that Whittredge painting his image, another artist made a drawing showing the Rockies from Denver, but with totally different intent. A.E. Mathews, who had produced a number of lithographs of the Civil War, moved to Colorado in 1865. He began to make prints of Colorado scenes, which in 1866 he gathered together and issued in a portfolio entitled Pencil Sketches of Colorado.

This portfolio included 36 plates, one of which showed Denver from a rise about one mile to the east of the city, with the Rockies prominently displayed in the background. In contrast to Whittredge's intent, Mathews was definitely trying to show the "progress" being made in Colorado, with Denver City shown neatly laid out and with some impressive looking buildings. However, in the text which accompanied the portfolio, Mathews makes it clear that "the principal object [of the view] being to show the eastern slope of the mountains in connection with the city."

He goes on to describe this view:

"So clear and pure is the air on the plains, that the mountains can be distinctly seen 175 miles off. The Rocky Mountains assume new, peculiar, and beautiful features almost every day and hour, according to the condition of the atmosphere and position of the sun. Sometimes on a bright moonlight night, or just before sunrise, the rocks, canons and trees stand out so distinctly that the mountains appear to be but a mile or two from Denver...When the air is clearer than usual, a most beautiful effect is seen just as the light of the sun has left the western horizon; the horizon is lighted up by a soft, cool, silvery light, caused by the sun shining on the western slow of the snow-covered mountains. The beauty of the sky and clouds in Colorado, especially in summer, rivals that of Italy."

These comments are right on, for every day the Rockies appear in a different and remarkable aspect. I love all of the prints above, but the real scene (which I get to see every day) beats them all.

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1840-1849. Part 1: Oregon

As discussed in the previous blog, in 1839, in the United States west of the Mississippi there were only three states, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. The remainder of the trans-Mississippi region was comprised of the territory of Iowa, consisting of the lands north of the state of Missouri lying between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and a large, unorganized Indian territory taking up the remainder of the old Louisiana Purchase, that is the lands between the three states and Iowa and the continental divide. The next decade was one of profound change for the United States, not only with new borders and states being established, but the size of the country increasing by about half-again as much.

While these three states and two territories were officially the extent of the United States, that was not all the land claimed by the country in 1840. The vast area lying to the north of Mexico and west of the continental divide, called by the Americans the Oregon Country, was in theory jointly administered by Great Britain and the United States, but by 1840, Americans were thinking that this was of necessity a part of their country.

The Treaty of 1818, between Great Britain and the United States, established the northern border of the United States for the lands gained by the Louisiana Purchase, with each country giving up a bit of land to the other. By the treaty, the border ran due south from the northwestern point of Lake of the Woods to the 49th parallel, and from thence straight west to the crest of the “Stony Mountains,” that is, the continental divide in the Rocky Mountains.

The treaty did not, however, continue the border west of the continental divide, for both sides felt that they had a strong claim to the lands between Mexico and Russian America. This area, called by the Americans the Oregon Country—-the British called it the Columbia District—-was the focus of a long simmering conflict between Great Britain and the United States.

For many years, the Pacific Northwest had been subject to differing claims by several countries—the British, Spanish, Russians and Americans. The Spanish claimed most of the land along the western coast of America based on their explorations in the 18th century. At the end of the century, Spain did grant Britain some rights in the area, but it wasn’t until the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, between the United States and Spain, that the latter agreed to a north border for its lands at the 42nd parallel. About the same time, Russia gave up its claims south of 54°40′.

This left the large area west of the continental divide and between 54°40′ and 42° to be disputed between Great Britain and the United States. Britain claimed the area because of its early exploration along the coast and because of overland explorations by British fur company men. The United States claimed the area because of Robert Gray’s discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 and the Lewis & Clark expedition, which reached Oregon Country in 1805.

Negotiations for the Treaty of 1818 did not resolve the dispute between the two countries for this area west of the continental divide.. The British saw this as a rich fur region and one that would limit the territorial expansion of the United States. The Americans saw Oregon as part of the natural lands that should be part of the United States by manifest destiny. Thus is was agreed that the region would have "joint occupancy" by the two countries.

This “solution” would not, of course, work in the long run. Initially, it was mostly British fur traders who were in the area, but in the 1830s, missionaries and settlers from the United States began to trickle into Oregon, the emigration reaching a steady stream in the 1840s. This lead to strong American support for annexing the entire Oregon Country, which was countered by British insistence of their control of all the lands north of the Columbia River. Neither country wanted to go to war (especially the United States which had just entered a war with Mexico, as will be discussed in the next blog in this series), so a compromise was reached in June 1846 to establish the border between the countries along the 49th parallel, extending this line across the continental divide from the east.

Thus it was in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, the United States gained its northwest corner, encompassing today’s states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and those parts of Montana and Wyoming west of the continental divide. This region was left as unorganized until 1848, when it established as the Oregon Territory, retaining this configuration until 1853. It was in this same decade, that the country also gained its southwest corner, as will be discussed in the next blog in this series.

With a French Accent

Next week a really interesting print exhibition will open at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Entitled With A French Accent. French and American Lithography Before 1860, it will run from March 14th through June 3rd. On display in the Morelle Lasky Levine '56 Works on Paper Gallery, the exhibition is free and open to the public. 



The exhibition is a joint project between the Davis Museum and the American Antiquarian Society. I have written many times in this blog about the AAS, one of the greatest and oldest American institutions with major collections of prints. The Davis Museum brings its own impressive credentials to this partnership. It is one of the oldest academic fine arts museums in the country, founded in 1889. It has an excellent permanent collection of paintings, sculptures, decorative objects and works on paper, and regularly holds fine exhibitions on many topics, including this new one on prints.


With a French Accent features about fifty French and American prints from the collections of the AAS, exploring the French roots of American lithography. The debt of American lithographs to the British is obvious and seminal, but French prints have had an equally important impact. This is a topic I have been interested in for quite some time (especially as related to the slightly “erotic” Currier & Ives prints based on French sources), so I am greatly looking forward to visiting this exhibition.

It is curated by Georgia Brady Barnhill ’66, Director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture, and Lauren B. Hewes, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, both of the American Antiquarian Society. As they state, the exhibition, and an accompanying publication, “uncover several themes: the importance of French technology, the circulation and reproduction of French imagery, the stylistic contributions of French lithographic artists, and the reproduction of American genre paintings by French publishers for distribution in Europe and the United States." Note that the latter point shows that the influence, at least to some extent, flowed both ways across the Atlantic.

The exhibit opens next week, and I believe the book will be out at about the same time, but of equal interest is the related March 31st symposium, "French and American Lithography: History and Practice," also a free, public event. This will be co-hosted by the Davis Museum and the Center for Historic American Culture at the AAS. The symposium will “explore transnational interconnection, particularly the impact on American lithography of artistic exchange between France and the United States through the 19th and 20th centuries and into contemporary practice."

The symposium will be terrific, but even if you cannot make that, anyone interested in American historical prints should make a point to visit the exhibition at Wesseley.

Men in the Young Republic

I have been a bit remiss in keeping this blog up-to-date with announcements of good print exhibitions, both in the physical and virtual worlds. Luckily, there is a fine, new online exhibit which I can call to your attention.


This is the American Antiquarian Society's exhibit, Men in the Young Republic. The AAS has a number of excellent exhibits on their web site, including the terrific Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints and this new exhibit maintains the high quality of the others.


The theme of the exhibit is a look at the depiction of American men and their world in popular prints from the first half century of the United States. There are sections on their home life, occupations, associations, fashions and recreations. The exhibit was curated by Sally Pierce, curator of prints and photographs at the Boston Athenaeum and editor of the American Historical Print Collectors Society's journal, Imprint.

Sally was recently interviewed for the AHPCS's News Letter about some of issues involved with online exhibitions. Excerpts from this interview follows (note that if you join the AHPCS, you would get both the newsletter and journal with your membership...):


News Letter (NL): How did you translate your selections [of prints for the exhibition] for a web audience--was it different?
Sally Pierce (SP): The process was a little different in preparing for the web....With physical space all elements come into play--size, harmony, orientation, color and style, while in the online space, you have different considerations. One they they have in common is attention to the condition of the items; there were some items I wanted to include, but the condition was so poor that it would not make for a good representation. This is especially true online as you want viewers to be attracted to the images enough to come and see them in person.


NL: Physical exhibits are noted for their abiity to inspire--did you keep this in mind for views?
SP: One exciting thing about online exhibitions is that, as a curator, you are freed from physical constraints of size--everything is equalized on the screen. So a large print and a book illustration can be displayed at the same dimensions. I believe this has an impact.


NL: As you have worked in galleries and museums, what challenges do you feel there are when moving exhibitions online?
SP: Well, for one you are looking at a surrogate of the item--which is great for getting your point across--but what you lose when not looking at a physical object is the connoisseurship of knowing different mediums, feels, tones etc. If one wants to be an art historian or a collector, the online environment does not move you forward enough to develop essential skills; or if you are an historian, it doesn't necessarily help you to envision the actual object. I'm not arguing that the web doesn't equal information, but to gain a deeper understanding, you need the object. On the flip side, the web presents the opportunity to bring people in to see your collection and online exhibitions can be great advertising.

False portraits of U.S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was probably, after Abraham Lincoln, the most often portrayed Civil War figure in prints of the time. Grant began the war as an obscure Union officer in the western theater, but his victory at Fort Donelson, February 15-16, 1862, brought Grant to the consciousness of the American public, the beginning of a hero status which would reach full flower with the fall of Vicksburg.

It seems appropriate to do a posting today, the 150th anniversary of the capture of Fort Donelson, about the interesting history of some early portrait prints of Grant.


At the beginning of the war, Grant wore his beard in a long, wild manner. A photograph, taken in October 1861 in Cairo, Illinois, shows this shaggy image, Grant depicted in his colonel’s uniform complete with ostrich feathers in his cap. After his first action at Belmont, Grant’s wife, Julia, joined him in camp and was horrified by his wild and wooly appearance. She told him in no uncertain terms that she “did not like the length of his beard,” so Grant forthwith had it clipped close to preserve marital harmony.

Grant’s victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, followed by Shiloh, led to a great curiosity on the part of the American public as to what this new Union hero looked like. The only image available of the general at this time was the photograph taken in Cairo, so this long-bearded Grant appeared in many prints of the time, even though by then he was close-shaved.

To add to this confusion, there was a photograph taken about the same time in Cairo that somewhat looked like Grant. This image is said to be of a beef contractor named William Grant, who resembled U.S. Grant, at least in his hirsute appearance. Either through actual misunderstanding or intentionally, this non-U.S. Grant photograph was used as the basis for a number of prints of the general, appearing both in the illustrated newspapers of the day and also in engravings.

Indeed, most of the first printed portraits of Grant were based on this erroneous image, including a cover illustration in Harper’s Weekly on March 8, 1862 and a steel engraving dated March 22, 1862, both issued shortly after the capture of Fort Donelson.


Eventually, new photographs of the close-shaved general appeared and these then were used as the basis of later prints. Still, for much of the early part of the war, the public's notion of what Grant looked like was based on this erroneous image Indeed, Harper’s Weekly continued to use this mistaken image to as late as 1864. Supposedly, Grant's officers found this amusing, but no record mentions what William Grant thought of his undeserved fame.

Currier & Ives sizes

One of the most common ways to spot a Currier & Ives reproduction is that the size is wrong. While there are some reproductions that are made to the same size as the originals, by far most Currier & Ives copies are the wrong size. This is an important point, but it also brings up the general topic of sizes as related to Currier & Ives, the subject of this posting.


The first thing to know about Currier & Ives sizes is that they are usually, and should always be given for just the images themselves, not including the margins nor the title area, and the vertical size is given first. The primary reason for this is that the “standard” reference listing Currier & Ives prints, Frederic A. Conningham’s Currier & Ives Prints. An Illustrated Check List gives the sizes in this way. Ever since it was first issued in 1949, this work lists the sizes of Currier & Ives prints (where they are given-—not all prints have their size indicated) “exclusive of margins.”

As Conningham's book became the standard reference for collectors and dealers from its first issue, and to some extent remains so today, it makes sense that those who work with Currier & Ives prints have followed Conningham in the way he gives measurements.

There are other reasons to do this as well. Gale Research’s listing of the prints (Currier & Ives. A Catalogue Raisonne) does not follow Conningham, but gives the vertical size as including the text below the image. This problematic, not only because it creates a discrepancy between the two reference books, but more importantly because the text below the image is sometimes trimmed, especially where there is a small copyright line below the title. This makes it impossible to check the size compared to the listing. This is as opposed to Conningham's measurements, for the image is much less often trimmed. And, of course, as the margins of many prints are trimmed at least somewhat, giving the measurements of the full sheet of paper would be practically useless.

Interestingly, however, in one way the Conningham measurements are not usually followed today, viz. in the measurement of the prints in sixteenths of inches. It makes sense to measure in inches, for these are quintessential American prints and so an American measurement should be used. However, many dealers and collectors measure only to the nearest eight of an inch. First off, Conningham used the notation, e.g., 8.4 to indicate 8 4/16th, rather than the more standard 8 1/4, but beyond this there is an even more fundamental reason not to use sixteenths of an inch.


That is that the sizes of original prints actually vary by a fair bit. There are a number of reasons for this. One would be what paper was used and how it was prepared for printing, as different lots of paper would respond differently over time. Then the most common is that paper expands or contracts over time, depending on how it was treated, whether it got wet, was stored in a humid environment and so forth. Thus the image drawn on the stone might be 8 1/4 tall, but the image on the paper today can vary from this either by being smaller or larger, the former being more common.

There is also the fact that Currier & Ives are known to have used different stones to make the same print. In order to be able to run off a lot of the prints, they would sometimes have two or more stones of the same image going at the same time. In some of these cases there are noticeable differences in the images, but in others the images were essentially the same. These duplicate stones were made using a transfer process and in doing this, the size of the image on the stones could vary somewhat.

So to be as precise as 1/16th of an inch doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Whenever one measures a Currier & Ives print, one should allow some variation in the size. How much is hard to say. Certainly an inch is too much, but for a large folio prints I would think upwards of about 3/8th inch difference from the “recorded” size would be acceptable if all other indications are that the print is an original. (Generally there will be more variation on the longer side than the shorter side).

As I indicated above, Conningham does not give the exact size of many of the prints. He does, however, always give a size category: “V.S.” for “very small,” “S” for small, “M” for medium, and “L” for large. Thus it is that dealers and collectors almost always will categorize Currier & Ives prints as being either “very small folio,” “small folio,” “medium folio,” and “large folio.”

Interestingly, the Currier & Ives firm itself never used these designations. I am not sure who first used these categories, but Conningham admits that he gives them “for convenience.” It is certainly true that most Currier & Ives prints were done either in a “small folio” size of about 8 1/2 x 12 1/2 or in a very large size, bigger than about 14 by 20, but really it is simply a convention to put all the prints into these four categories. There is quite a difference in the sizes within each group, and this sometimes leads to differences of opinion over, for instance, whether a print is a largish small folio or a smallish medium folio.

For what it is worth, Conningham says that a very small folio print is up to 7 x 9, a small folio is approximately 8 1/2 x 12 1/2, a medium is between about 9 x 14 to 14 x 20, and a large folio is over 14 x 20. One oddity is that Gale Research’s listing accepts these measurements from Conningham, even though their measuring system it totally different! As they are using the text in the size, they should either have increased the vertical sizes of their categories or have said that their size categories used only the image size. However, as I indicated, I think Gale Research got the whole measuring thing wrong from the beginning.


What my shop does is give both the category size and the size of the image itself. We have also followed this measuring system for other prints and maps, though there is less universal acceptance of this for other types of prints. Still, for Currier & Ives it is best to know and follow these conventions. It will help if you want to describe your print to someone else, it is the standard convention followed by most dealers who regularly deal with the prints, and it is the easiest way to check if you have an original or not.

For more on Currier & Ives, feel free to visit us at the Philadelphia Print Shop West.

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1830-39

As described in the previous blog from this series, by 1830, three relatively small political entities (two states and a territory) had been created in the original Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The remainder of the purchase lands, now called the Missouri Territory, was mostly occupied by Indian tribes. Some of these Native Americans had been located in the trans-Mississippi West for a long time, but many had been pushed west relatively recently by the advance of EuroAmericans from the east coast ever westward. Still, there were significant Indian populations east of the Mississippi, especially in the southeastern part of the United States.

From the beginning of their settlement in the southeast, EuroAmericans saw the five “civilized tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) as impediments in the way of their desire for land. Beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century, military and political pressure was brought by the U.S. government to get those tribes to give up their land in the southeast in exchange for new lands in the Missouri Territory. By the 1820s, much of the Indian land in the southeast was under government control, though few Native Americans had actually moved across the Mississippi.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress in order to enable to government to "remove" these tribes from the southeast to the trans-Mississippi West. This was supposed to be voluntary, but even more pressure was put on the tribes to accept this removal. Over the next decade, these tribes signed treaties or were forced by military action to move west, and by the end of the decade, most Native Americans from the southeast had moved across the Mississippi.

In order to try to protect the Native Americans in their new lands, and of course also to keep them contained, the Indian Intercourse Act was passed in 1834, setting aside for the Indians "…all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the territory of Arkansas…". That is, essentially all of the Missouri Territory, encompassing the original Louisiana Purchase excepting the three political entitles which had been created in the previous decade.


Most of the land granted to the “removed” Indians was in the southern region, to the west of Arkansas, though there were many other tribes in the more northern parts of the territory. Replaying the previous history of the relationship between the U.S. government and Native Americans, however, this vast Indian territory was regularly whittled down in size through the rest of the century. For instance, just two years after the Indian Intercourse Act, the Sac & Fox tribes were convinced to give back the lands between the state of Missouri and the Missouri river, moving the northwestern border of the state to the west.

The original “Northwest Territory” comprised those lands west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. By the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, this territory was to be broken up into states and smaller territories as the population increased.

In 1818, when Indiana and Illinois were made states, the remainder of the original Northwest Territory became the Michigan Territory (essentially today’s Michigan, Wisconsin and the eastern part of Minnesota).

In 1834, the Michigan Territory was expanded to include those parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of the state of Missouri and east of the Missouri River, that is, including what today are the rest of Minnesota, Iowa and the eastern parts of the Dakota’s.

In 1836, Arkansas was admitted as the twenty-fifth state. As the thirteenth slave state, this gave slavery proponents an advantage in Congress, so it was decided that a new, free state of Michigan would be admitted (which it was in January 1837). The entire Michigan Territory was too large to be admitted as a state, so in the summer of 1836, the western part of the territory (today’s Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and the eastern parts of Dakota) was broken off as the Wisconsin Territory.

Just two years later, the parts of the Wisconsin Territory that were west of the Mississippi were broken off as the Iowa Territory. This new territory, then, encompassed all the lands between the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers from the state of Missouri north to the Canadian border. The Wisconsin Territory was reduced to just those parts east of the Mississippi, that had been part of the original Northwest Territory, a situation which continued until 1848 when Wisconsin was made a state with its current borders.

Thus, in 1839, the trans-Mississippi United States consisted of three states hugging the river—Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri, the territory of Iowa, lying between the Missouri and Mississippi, and a large Indian territory lying between these states and territory and the continental divide. Besides this, a vast area north of Mexico and west of the continental divide, called by the Americans the Oregon Country, was in theory jointly administered by Great Britain and the United States. The story of that region will be the subject of the next blog on shaping the trans-Mississippi west.