Visions West exhibition

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Louisiana Purchase, through the rest of the century, Americans have been fascinated by the trans-Mississippi West. This fascination created a ready market for images of the American frontier, a market that was served by a plethora of artists and printmakers.

I have always been interested in depictions of the American West by those who were early travelers there, an interest which has become particularly keen with my move to Denver. I have begun to delve past those prints which I have studied for years, by artists such as George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, and learn more about the many other artists who traveled to the West on private and government explorations. Thus it was that I was especially pleased to hear of a new exhibition opening up just a few miles from our shop in Denver on the subject of images of the frontier West.

The exhibit is entitled "Visions West: 19th Century Expedition Artists," and it is running from now until April 3rd at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. I was able to attend the opening a couple of weeks ago and I was surprised and absolutely delighted at what a tremendous exhibit it is.

The theme of the exhibit is nineteenth century printed images of the American West done by on-the-spot artists. The prints in the exhibit are from the collection of Graham Curtis (about whose collection I will be writing a blog in the near future), which were generously loaned to the Arvada Center by Graham and Barbara Curtis with the help of their daughter Kay Hunsaker. The quality, variety and scope of the prints in the exhibit are amazing, making this an exhibition which anyone interested in the topic has to try to come and view.

The big names--Catlin, Bodmer, Bierstadt, Audubon, Moran--are all there, but the real strength in the exhibit are all the less well known, but equally important artists who documented the West between 1822 and 1883. Some of these artists, such as Seth Eastman, Peter Rindisbacher, and A.E. Mathews, were not part of Government expeditions, but most of the artists whose prints are on display were part of various explorations sent out by the Federal government. These include images by artists such as James W. Abert, John Mix Stanley, Samuel Seymour, John J. Young, Arthur Schott and many more whose accurate, first-hand images provide us with a window on the American West while it was still a "wild frontier."

The exhibition in Arvada is very nicely presented. The prints are arranged by artist, rather than date, and this allows one to look at some of these familiar prints from a new perspective, focusing on the artists, not so much the expeditions. The staff has written informative text on each artist and his work, and so the exhibit is a feast for the mind as well as the eye. All involved should be proud of this wonderful exhibit and again I encourage anyone who can to stop by to see the exhibit before it closes on April 3rd.

On April 12, 1861, the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, beginning the American Civil War, a conflagration which raged for almost exactly four years before, on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The Civil War, as much as the American Revolution, was a defining event in American history, and this conflict has always figured large in the awareness of the American public.

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War will generate renewed interest in the war, with many events, texts, and other media pouring forth this year. As I am particularly interested in historical prints, I have always been a student of contemporary prints of the Civil War. Thus, I have decided to jump on the bandwagon and produce a section of our web site which will specifically consider how the war was pictured in contemporary printed images. This section of our site is called A Nation Divided.

The Civil War took place at a time when two significant historical trends combined to make the relevance of prints particularly important. First was the development, in the nineteenth century, of a growing percentage of the American population which both was literate and had an interest in and the wealth to afford books, magazines, newspapers, and prints for the home. The other trend was the development of printmaking processes that allowed for the relatively inexpensive production of large numbers of printed pictures and maps.

So, a century and a half ago, as the United States made its inevitable way towards the cataclysm which would tear the nation apart, these important historical trends made it so that printed images would become one of, if not the most important means by which the general public would follow the war. Thousands of portraits of political and military leaders, patriotic and partisan images, and scenes of the events and places of the war were printed and disseminated around the country (mostly in the North), providing many Americans with much of their understanding of what was going on in the war. These printed images provided one of the main threads in the fabric of Americans' lives from 1861 to 1865.

Thus it is that I believe the study of contemporary printed images of the Civil War is crucial to gain insight into that traumatic event in our nation's history. Not only do these pictures show us today what those people, places and events looked like (although not by any means always accurately), but also it is only through an awareness of these prints that we can gain any true understanding as to how Americans of the time saw the war.

An important part of the intent of this section of our web site is that it be a useful reference source for those interested in the topic, exploring the history, nature and impact of contemporary printed images of the Civil War. We will put up pages on general topics, such as portraits, cartoons, etc., but a main part of the web site will be a monthly account of the events of the war 150 years ago, with a consideration of the prints showing those events.

This web site is also, of course, intended as a sales tool for our shop. Thus we will include images and descriptions of prints and maps we have in our inventory, along with images which are important to the topic at hand, even if we do not have them for sale.

I welcome comments and corrections. As an historian and printseller, there are few subjects as important to my work and the shop as the prints of the Civil War. I would love to spread knowledge of and interest in this fascinating subject.

An Education: a stolen Speed map

I recently watched the 2009 movie, An Eduction, which takes place in and around London in 1961 and is about a 16 year old girl, Jenny Mellor, who meets a man, David Goldman, almost twice her age, with whom she has an affair that ends unhappily. I thought the movie was terrific, but I was definitely surprised to see that a seventeenth-century map by John Speed played a cameo role.

While David is an appealing fellow, charming everyone in Jenny's family, he soon turns out to be something of a rogue. This all seems fairly harmless, and indeed is part of David's charm, until the inevitable truth come out that David is married, has a child, and has had similar affairs with other young woman in the past. I was going along with this plot line quite happily until about mid-way through the film when one particular scene put me right off David and his roguishness.

In this scene, Jenny, David, his friend Danny, and Danny's girl friend Helen are driving around the British country-side when they see a house-for-sale sign. Unexpectedly, David pulls over and he and Danny march off to view the house, sternly insisting that Jenny not join them. This mysterious attitude is soon explained when David and Danny stroll out of the house with a framed map in their possession, quickly piling into the car and driving off.

It is clear that the map was stolen from the owner of the house. Jenny is upset by this episode, to which David replies:

"It's an old map. A Speed. Poor dear didn't even know what it was. It's a waste. It shouldn't spend its life on a wall in...wherever the hell we were. It should be with us. We know how to look after it properly. We liberated it."

Well, right there I was totally put off David, though Jenny decided this wasn't so bad, thus continuing on her fateful path towards her deeper disappointment in the end.

Now, my wife tells me I am a prude about movies. Unethical behavior (criminal or sexual) is the foundation of many good movies, but I must say that I do not like it when the movie implies this behavior is just fine or at least can be "winked" at. And to steal a map! That really got my goat. I knew that if David was stealing old maps, he was definitely not a person that Jenny should hitch her wagon to! Quite honestly, if it had all turned out well in the end, I think I would not have liked the movie half so much as I did (I think my wife is probably right....)

So what was it that they stole? A map by John Speed (1552-1629). Speed is probably best known for his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first issued in 1611 and then several times again over the next few decades. Speed spent over 15 years assembling the information for this atlas, which contains maps of the entire British Isles, the individual nations, and separate maps for the counties. In 1627, Speed produced his A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, which included maps of the rest of the world.

In many ways, it was Speed's maps which spurred the development of map collecting in the 20th century. Speed's maps are very attractive, with many decorative features such as coats-of-arms, city plans, vignettes of battles, and images of costumed figures. Dealers discovered that if these maps were colored (and almost all were issued uncolored), they would be decorative enough to appeal to the general public and so these became the bread & butter stock for many British dealers. I think that the Speed maps gave dealers enough business to encourage the trade and also brought in enough new buyers that this really was the genesis of modern map-collecting.

Be that as it may, Speed maps became very popular in the 1950s and 60s, and so they remain to this day. His maps are quite expensive, ranging from the mid-hundreds to over $20,000 for his world map. So, it is not surprising that David, who obviously did not have a robust ethical sense, might want to steal one when he saw the opportunity.

One of the interesting things about An Education is that it is based on a real-life memoir of the same title by Lynn Barber, a newspaper writer and interviewer. It turns out the theft of a Speed map was an actual event in her relationship with her older lover.

One weekend I was moaning - I was always moaning - "I'm bored with Bateman Street", so we drove out towards Newmarket. At a place called Six Mile Bottom, I saw a thatched cottage with a For Sale sign outside. "Look, how pretty," I said. "'Why can't you buy nice places like that, instead of horrible old slums?" "Perhaps we can," said Simon, so we bounced up to the cottage and an old lady showed us round. I was bored within minutes, but Simon seemed unconscionably interested in the bedroom corridor which he kept revisiting. Then I saw him going out to the car, carrying something.

Eventually we left and went for lunch at a hotel in Newmarket. We were having a rather lugubrious meal when two men came into the dining room and one pointed the other towards our table. The man introduced himself as a detective. He said: "We've had a complaint from a Mrs so and so of Six Mile Bottom. She says a couple visited her cottage this morning and afterwards she noticed that a valuable antique map by Speed was missing from one of the bedrooms." "Oh, Simon!" I said. He shot me a look. "Perhaps we could have this conversation outside," he suggested. He went outside with the policeman. I waited a few minutes and then went to the Ladies, and out the back door and away down the street. I had just enough money for a train back to London. I hoped Simon would go to prison.

He didn't of course; he bounced round to Clifden Road a few days later and took me out to dinner. "How could you steal from an old lady?" "I didn't steal. She asked me to have the map valued." "No she didn't - I was with you." "All right, she didn't ask me. But I recognised that the map was by Speed and I thought if I got it valued for her, it would be a nice surprise."

I knew he was lying, but I let it go. I said: "If you ever really stole something, I would leave you." He said: "I know you would, Minn." But actually I knew he had stolen something and I didn't leave him, so we were both lying.

Unfortunately, I couldn't tell from the very quick view of the map in the movie what the map was of, and of course the original memoir doesn't say what Speed map it was. So what would this "valuable" map have been worth in 1961? My only sources for this are the early 1960s issues of Ken Nebenzahl's catalogues, which do list a number of Speed maps. Most of the country maps were listed for about $20 to $35 (today these are in the low four figures), while the better American regional maps were $125 to $150 (today these sell in the middle thousands). Based on this, I would think the world map might have been as much as $200-$250.

So what does this mean in today's dollars? It means that if they had a comparable price today, the country maps would be sold for between about $150 and $250, the regional American maps $900 and $1,100, and the world map maybe $1,500 to $1,800. Makes you wish you could go back and stock up on these maps! I would be interested to know what map it was that Lynn's lover stole, but in any case, this story--both in the movie and the memoir--is an interesting one and it does show the notoriety of the maps of John Speed even half a century ago.

Denver Public Library

Last week I attended a breakfast meeting at the Denver Public Library about their new Creating Communities project. This is a terrific program which is designed to make the historical resources of the library, as well as those from other affiliated institutions, accessible to the general public through the Creating Communities web site. As a die-hard believer in the use of historical material to promote knowledge and understanding of our past, and so also of our present, I was delighted to find out about this program.

First a word about the Denver Public Library. Until this summer, I lived for the last three decades in Philadelphia, which has one of the oldest and best public library systems in the country, so I was very pleased to find that the Denver library system is also absolutely first rate. The library was established in 1889, the city librarian calling it a “center of public happiness.” In 1910, a new Central Library building was constructed, and then over the next decade eight branch libraries were built, all with the generous help of Andrew Carnegie. As the library system matured, new branches were opened, old ones refurbished, and in 1995 an outstanding new Central Library was built, designed by Michael Graves.

I am a fan not only of libraries, but also of institutions which hold collections of prints & maps. It turns out that in Denver the public library is the institution in this area with the best collection of historic printed images, a collection held in the Western History and Genealogy department. Their collection of Western Americana is, without question, one of the best in the country.

Opened in 1935, the Western collection was initially intended to focus on books by Colorado authors, but soon the department broadened its focus to encompasses all phases of the development of the trans-Mississippi West. To quote the library web site, “[t]he collection continues to grow and presently includes 200,000 cataloged books, pamphlets, atlases, maps, and microfilm titles. In addition, it offers 600,000 photographs, 3,700 manuscript archives, and a remarkable collection of Western fine art and prints to researchers across the world.”

Among the collections in which the library is particularly strong are publications of Western railroads, reports and maps of Colorado mining companies, trade catalogs, records and printed memorabilia of Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, frontier theater programs, land grant materials, Colorado territorial imprints, architectural drawings, and extensive clipping files of local newspapers. The maps and atlases, of which there are about 6,000, and the historical views are, of course, of particular interest to me. The Western Collection is a place I plan to spend much time researching.

As with any library, one of the main goals of the Denver Public Library is to reach out to the community, both to provide it with access to its resources, but also to stimulate curiosity and increase knowledge. That is what Creating Communities does. Other local institutions are also involved in the project, including the City of Denver, History Colorado, the Auraria Library, the University of Colorado at Denver, and the University of Denver Penrose Library. This program makes available on the web many of the resources about Denver and its history from these institutions. One of the main parts of the web site is a section with information on seven of Denver’s historic neighborhoods, and many of the Western Collection’s archival materials, in digital form, are also available through the site, including property maps of the city.

An interesting part of the program is “myDenver”, which is designed to allow the general public to upload photographs and stories of their own, and to be part of an ongoing conversation about their city. The further development of myDenver is one of the main goals of the Creating Communities program going forward.

I was rather spoiled by the extensive institutional riches of Philadelphia and I was a bit concerned in moving to “the West,” that I would be bereft of this important type of resource. I was, as I should have known, mistaken in this, for Denver not only has its own rich history (though not as long a one as Philadelphia) but also its own wealth of historical material which available to me and to anyone else with an interest in the history of this wonderful city.

Peter Marzio

I just learned of the passing, on December 9, of one of the superstars of the print world, Peter C. Marzio. Peter was the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, a post he held for almost three decades, and he was instrumental in helping build the museum into a world-class cultural center. He died last Thursday from cancer at age 67, much too soon.

Peter's was something of a rags to riches story. He was born into a working-class immigrant family, becoming the first in his family to graduate from High School. At Juniata College he became inspired by the art and museum world, deciding to make this his career. He went on to earn a doctorate in art and American history from the University of Chicago. He served as curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian and then as director and chief executive officer of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, before becoming the director in Houston.

Peter is best known to the general public for his art scholarship, educational programs and for his dynamic leadership of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. However, for those in the print world, Peter is "the man" when it came to chromolithography. As I have mentioned many times in this blog, I think chromolithographs of the nineteenth century are among the most interesting and over-looked American prints and it was Peter's work which turned me on to these wonderful prints.

In 1979, while director at the Corcoran, Peter Marzio wrote his superb book on American chromolithographs, The Democratic Art. Pictures for a 19th-Century America, , as well as curated an exhibition on the subject at the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. This was the first time that a serious work on American 19th-century chromolithographs was published and that a major exhibit on the subject was put on.

The books is tremendous and when I first read it, it opened my eyes as to the fascination and importance of these hitherto overlooked prints. Peter wrote in his preface that "My deepest wish is that this book will help students to see the field of American lithography as worth of research." It certainly has done that, and while Peter contributed a huge amount else to the art world, if this was all he had done, his name would still be one revered among those with an interest in American prints. The world is a poorer place now than before his death, but much richer for his having been in it.

Audubon's Birds of America sets record price

On December 7th, a beautiful, complete copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America sold at Sotheby's auction in London for a hammer price of 6.5 million pounds. With the commission charged by Sotheby's, this brought the total paid by the buyer to slightly over $11.5 million dollars! The work, complete with its 435 hand-colored aquatints bound into four volumes, sold to London art dealer Michael Tollemache. You can read the BBC report on the sale and watch an interesting video on the BBC News web site.

This is the most ever paid for a printed book, a record established both because Audubon is "the" great name in American natural history illustration, but also because this is a superb example of an extremely scarce book. Audubon's masterpiece was very expensive even when produced, so few were published. Just over 100 complete sets are known to exist, almost all of which are held in public institutions. The last complete set to go at auction sold for $8.8 million dollars in 2000.

It is interesting to note that when one takes into account inflation since 2000, the new record of $11.5 million is not a significantly higher price than was paid for the set a decade ago. So, I guess one can conclude that the value of this work is not really increasing that much. However, I would note that the economies of 2000 and 2010 are very different, so for the volume to even maintain its value is pretty impressive.

A sale of this magnitude is interesting to reflect upon. What is going to happen to this set? Will it affect the prices of individual prints? What does this say about the print market?

As to what is going to happen to the set, the new owner calls his set "priceless" and says that he will just keep it and enjoy it for a while, though he did not rule out eventually selling it. Frankly, I do not buy this (though it could, of course, be true). $11,500,000 is a lot of money for any dealer (unless Bill Gates decides to become an art dealer) to invest in something he is simply going to enjoy. My guess is that Mr. Tollemache already intends to sell or has already sold the set.

So, did the new owner buy the set with the intent of putting it on the market to see how it goes? I will say that I find it hard to believe the set was bought on speculation. Given that this is a very widely publicized auction price, and given that this is the most ever paid for a printed book, how much upside is there on the price that a dealer could ask? Certainly, even a small percentage, say 5%, is a lot of money ($575,000), but $11.5 million is a lot of money to put up front to make only half a million.

Now Mr. Tollemache made the surprising assertion that the amount he paid was well less than the amount one could get if one broke up the set and sold the prints individually (something his emphatically denied intending doing). This sure sounds a bit like a sales pitch to a prospective client (gee, Tom, just think, if your gold mines go bust you can always break the set and make a tidy profit selling them individually...).

However, Mr. Tollemache's claim is just not true. If one calculates the per print price of this set, it comes to about $26,500 per plate. That seems pretty reasonable when a good number of the better birds are bringing well over $100,000 each. However, if anyone has looked through the full set of Audubon images (you can do this even with the octavo set to understand this point), you will realize that there are a lot of prints of smaller or not terribly attractive birds where the prints sell on today's market for only around $2,000 each. And there are even more of these prints---of quite attractive and biggish birds---which sell for between $4,000 and $20,000, still under the average price of this set.

So, if you take out all these prints, the ones selling for under $20,000, the average cost of the remaining birds is much, much higher than $26,500. I have not calculated the exact figure of the 435 prints at today's retail, but I can tell you it will not be equal to, much less greater than, $11.5 million.

So, this raises a few questions: why did Mr. Tollemache make this implausible claim, what are his plans for this set, and how will this affect the market for Audubon prints? My guess to the first two questions is that Mr. Tollemache actually bid on this set for an unknown client. This would make a lot of sense, for if he is using someone else's money, then a small percentage profit would be great. This would also explain his comment on the break-up value, trying to make his client feel good about the purchase. It is even possible that Mr. Tollemache did the bidding for the client at only a token commission, as the publicity of being the buyer of this set is "priceless."

This is, I want to emphasize, pure speculation. I know nothing about Mr. Tollemache other than what I have read since the sale. My comments are also not really at all pejorative, for it would not be at all surprising if a new owner of this work would want to remain anonymous. Also if Mr. Tollemache is fibbing, it is a harmless fib and one of a sort that is not uncommon in the art world. I may be wrong, but it sure makes a lot more sense to me that Mr. Tollemache bought this for someone than that he bought it for himself.

As to how this sale will affect the market for Audubon prints, I think probably not a lot. First, as noted this price is not really that much higher than the 2000 price, when adjusted for inflation, so I do not think anyone is going to think all of a sudden that Audubon prints are worth more than they were. The publicity will increase interest in Audubon prints, but such increased interest does not often turn into an increase in sales/values. For instance, after Ken Burns' Civil War series appeared, there was a lot of increased interest in prints of the Civil War, but very little increase in sales of them.

I am, however, encouraged by the sale. Any publicity about an any prints helps raise the general awareness of the items with which I work, and that is great. Also, it shows that there is a belief that prints can be things which have a significant value and that even in today's economy they are worth investing in.

Thematic maps

A thematic map is a type of map which is designed to show a particular theme, other than geographic data, expressed onto a geographic base. Themes can include social, cultural, political, economic, agricultural, climatic, historical, or pretty much any other theme which has a presence in the physical world. Thematic maps differ from regular maps in that for the latter, the geographic information is the end in itself whereas for the former, it provides the context for the thematic data.

What thematic maps do is to give the viewer a unique way to look at quantitative information, which can provide insight not obtainable directly from the raw data itself. It is the nexus of the data and the geographic base which presents new patterns, which in turn can lead to a new understanding of the data and, in some case, important discoveries.

Perhaps the earliest extant thematic map is the Turin Papyrus, an Egyptian map from about 1160 BC, which was prepared for Ramesses IV’s expedition to Wadi Hammamat to obtain sandstone for his construction projects. The map shows the wadi with the location of gold deposits indicated, as well as the distribution of different rocks and gravels (by use of different colors and symbols), making this the first geological map.

Another early thematic map is the Peutinger table, a map based on a 4th-century Roman map. A 13th-century copy of the original map was discovered at the end of the fifteenth century and ended up with Konrad Peutinger (thus its name). The map shows Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, but the map is designed to show the roads and travel routes of the Roman legions, with each day’s march marked on the roads. It is very elongated, as the map is built around the Roman road system network which primarily ran east-west.

One of the most important figures in thematic mapping was British astronomer Edmond Halley, who published the first meteorological chart in 1686 and then a map of magnetic variation in 1701.

The most famous early example of thematic mapping was John Snow’s map of the incidents of cholera in London in 1854. Cholera was a serious and not-understood health issue in the nineteenth century. Snow decided to plot the incidents of cholera onto a map of the London neighborhood just north of Piccadilly Circus, upon which was also marked the water pump locations. The pattern which emerged clearly showed that the cholera incidents centered around a pump on Broad Street, indicating that this was the source of the epidemic. The pump was put out of commission and new cholera cases ceased. This was the first real indication that cholera was spread by tainted water and not through some air-borne medium.

Thematic maps use various techniques, such as the marks used by Snow, or applying different colors to represent different densities of the theme in question (choropleth maps), or the use of proportional symbols on a map, or isarithmic or contour maps, where a fixed data point of, say, precipitation or temperature, is mapped in a continuous line on the map (reminds me of what a map of Alcatraz by an ex-prisoner is called, a Con Tour map…).

While few thematic maps have had quite the impact of Dr. Snow’s, there have been many instances of important and fascinating thematic maps over the years. A nice book on the topic is Arthur H. Robinson’s 1982 Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography.

The subject of this blog was inspired by a fascinating talk on thematic maps by Dr. Susan Schulten of the University of Denver. Her talk, “Disease Mapping and the Advent of Meteorology in America,” was presented as part of the Arts in Medicine program at the University of Colorado medical school. Susan looked at how the attempt to understand the nineteenth century epidemics of cholera and yellow fever involved the use of maps (the Snow map, obviously, featuring prominently), and how the success of thematic mapping in this arena extended its use to other areas of science, such as meteorology.

Susan (another example of the terrific network of map scholars who are members of the Rocky Mountain Map Society) is nearing completion of a book on thematic mapping. This is what she says about her project.... “The book I'm writing is a history of thematic mapping in the nineteenth century, looking at maps of the present but also the rising interest in old maps and maps of the past at that time. I'm closing in on a draft of the entire manuscript…. It will come out with Chicago, and will be accompanied by a website where high resolution versions of the maps will be available for close inspection.” I am looking forward to its publication and I’ll make sure to announce it in this blog when it makes its appearance.