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In 1784, British artist Thomas Rowlandson submitted two watercolors to the Royal Academy member’s exhibition: The Serpentine River and Vauxhall. They were recognized by the critics and at 28 years-old, Rowlandson emerged as an artist of note. The later work was engraved by Robert Pollard for wide distribution the following year. One of the finest aquatintists of the period, Francis Jukes (1745-1812), was hired to recreate the look of the watercolor and the print was published by John Raphael Smith (1752-1812), one of the leading printmakers of the day, who published prints after Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney.

In Vauxhall, figures are caricatured but identifiable, including Mrs. Weichsel singing from the front balcony and Mr. Barthelemon leading the orchestra. Below is a supper party with James Boswell, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and Oliver Goldsmith. Boswell did frequent Vauxhall and said “I am a great friend to pubic amusements; for they keep people from vice. You would now have been with a wench had you not been here.” Playwright and columnist Captain Topham is looking through a spyglass at the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister, Lady Duncannon. Further to the right, the Prince of Wales flirts with his former mistress Perdita Robinson, who remains on the arm of her husband.

Vauxhall Gardens originated in 1661, was renovated in 1732 and remained a popular venue well into the 19th century. As described in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, “There being a mixture of curious shew, gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear; for all which only a shilling is paid; and, though last, not least, good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale.”

Rowlandson liked to go there in the evening to watch and draw. He created at least two watercolors and several prints featuring the Garden. However, there is no recorded impression of this image “drawn and engraved by Rowlandson” as the Princeton print claims. The inscribed border of our print gives the publisher as Richard Powell, with no date, and names many of the celebrities in the scene, but there is no listing of such a print in Grego’s catalogue raisonné. Most likely it is one of many illegal reprintings of Rowlandson’s popular prints.

Joseph Grego (1843-1908), Rowlandson the Caricaturist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880) Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Oversize Rowlandson 703.3q

James Boswell (1740-1795), The Life of Samuel Johnson (Printed by Henry Baldwin, for Charles Dilly …, 1791) Rare Books (Ex) 3804.3.59

Paul Allier, Les quatre saisons (Paris: Galerie Lutétia, [192-?]). Pochoir plates. Copy 918 of 1000. Gift of Charles Rahn Fry. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2004-0389Q

The German artist Hans Sebald Beham (1500-1550), who often went by Sebald Beham or HSB, grew up in Nuremberg during a time of political unease. The Nuremberg council actively sought out prints that might be considered propaganda or printmakers who might be religious agitators. Sebald, his brother Barthel (1502-1540), and their colleague George Pencz (1500-1550) were nicknamed the “Godless Painters” when they were brought to trial for atheism, specifically a disbelief in transubstantiation. All three were expelled from Nuremberg, only to return after about ten months.

Sebald was chiefly recognized for his small engravings in the style of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the undisputed superstar of the era, but this similarity also brought him trouble. When Hieronymus Andreae (ca.1500-1556) hired Sebald in 1527 to illustrated a Lutheran prayer book and several other projects, the two were accused of plagiarizing Dürer and Sebald was once again forced out of Nuremberg.

Settling in Frankfurt, Sebald produced nearly 2,000 prints during his career. The same year he engraved the putti above, he was also one of several artists responsible for the woodcuts used in the first Paris Bible to contain illustrations in the Renaissance style, as recognized by bibliographer Ruth Mortimer. She writes, “The first three Old Testament cuts are based on Holbein blocks common to the Dance of Death and Icones sets; the remainder of the Old Testament illustration derives chiefly from a series by Hans Sebald Beham.” (French 16th century books GA Z881 .H346)

For more, see Gustav Pauli (1866-1938), Hans Sebald Beham: ein kritisches Verzeichnis seiner Kupferstiche, Radierungen und Holzschnitte (Strassburg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1901). Marquand Library (SA) ND588.B4 P2

Axel Klinkowström (1775-1837), engraved by Carl Fredrik Akrell (1779-1868), Brodway gatan och Rådhuset i New York (published in Klinkowstöm’s Atlas, Stockholm, 1824). Gift of Leonard L. Milberg, class of 1953. Graphic Arts

Swedish Baron Axel Leonhard Klinkowström (or Klinckowström) became an ensign at the age of 17 and rose to Lieutenant-Colonel. It was in detached service from the naval fleet that he visited the United States from 1818 to 1820. The purpose of his trip was to investigate the American steamboat and study its possibilities for use by the Swedish navy.

During these two years in America, Klinkowström wrote 25 illustrated letters home to Admiral Claes Cronstedt and the Swedish public, which were published in 1924 under the title Bref om de Förenta Staterna (EX Oversize 1053.527.1824E, 2 v.+ atlas) and translated into English in 1957 as Baron Klinkowström’s America, 1818-1820 (Recap 1053.527)

Here are a few excerpts:

The harbor is full of small sailing vessels, yachts, and schooners which come from all America’s ports to this mid-point of all movement. Usually these ships are well-painted and are built in a light and handsome style. The steamboats which come and go like stagecoaches add great activity to this picture. Behind the city itself the great Hudson River empties into the harbor, which is large and reaches as far as New Jersey. This grand panorama is bounded by the New Jersey coast and the highlands on the other side of the Hudson.

…I want to advise any travelers who plan to stay in this country for a while not to live in expensive hotels. Everywhere, and especially here in New York, there are boarding houses where one can lodge comfortably and enjoy adequate board at varying rates. The advantage of these boarding houses over hotels is that one lives in closed company which is pleasant, for the guest are people with some education and with whom one can become acquainted. Breakfast is served at nine o’clock, after which each one goes to his duties. Dinner is served at four or five and then the guests gather in the living room before a glowing fire where the evening is spent in card playing, games, or merriment.

…According to what I have found, people here show more respect for the laws than they do in Europe, and do not require such strong measures to govern and maintain authority. Although the American people are compounded from different nations, although different tongues are spoken and different religious sects exist, less grave crimes are committed…than in Europe. Contrast this with conditions in Southern Europe, where, despite watchful police and strong armies and severe punishment, it is still not always possible to protect the peaceful citizen…

http://www.royalcollection.org
.uk/eGallery/object.asp?maker=12720&object
=400747&row=6

Mezzotint engraver Richard Earlom (1742-1822), executed a series of prints after drawings and paintings by well-known artists such as Claude Lorraine, Jan van Huysum, Guido Reni, Joshua Reynolds, and others. This mezzotint reproduces an oil painting attributed to Johann Zoffany, depicting 36 members or academicians (RAs) of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The group is seen in the Life Room at the Old Somerset House, where members gathered for life drawings sessions. Each of the figures can be identified, and a complete list of names can be found on the National Portrait Gallery’s website: http://www.npg.org.uk

Full membership to the academy is limited to painters, printmakers, sculptors, or architects actively working in Great Britain. Both Earlom and Zoffany were elected to this celebrated group. In the beginning, both men and women were accepted into membership: Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Mary Moser (1744-1819) were among the founding members. However, these two women were not allowed to serve on the governing council of the Academy, or to take part in committee work, as other members were required to do. The two women were also not allowed to attend life classes, where models were drawn in the nude. So it is fitting that these two women are only seen in this image as portraits on the wall.

Things quickly got worse for female artists. The organization discouraged other women from joining and after Kauffman and Moser died, no other female artist was accepted to full membership until 1922. The only exception came in the late-nineteenth century, when a few women were allowed to hold a life class inside the Academy but no men were allowed in the room.

To see other work by Earlom, see Liber veritatis (1777-1819). Marquand Library SAX Oversize ND553.G3 A31f

Minamoto no Noriyori (1156-1193) sixth son of Minamoto no Yoshitomo

These three Japanese men were half-brothers during the late Heian and early Kamakura period. They were also successful generals whose achievements made them celebrated figures in the battles of the Genpei War. From 1180-1185, they fought against the Taira warriors, leading tens of thousands of soldiers over mountains and across seas. The brothers won magnificent battles and accomplished remarkable feats to successfully retake the city of Kyoto and ultimately defeat their enemies in the climactic Battle of Dan no Ura in April 1185.

However, suspicion and envy led to violent arguments between the brothers and in 1189, Yoritomo ordered that Yoshitsune be put to death. Noriyori was asked to lead the expedition to kill their brother and when he refused, Yoritomo had him sent into exile and later executed. To save face, Yoshitsune committed suicide.

Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199) third son of Minamoto no Yoshitomo

The story of Yoshitsune has been retold in many books and songs, as well as a movie by Akira Kurosawa entitled Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi (They Who Step on a Tiger's Tail), based on the kabuki play Kanjincho.

For more information, see Elizabeth Oyler, Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). East Asian Library (Gest): Western PL747.33.W3 O95 2006

In 1731, the British printmaker John Baptist Jackson arrived in Venice and found work with printmaker Count Antonio Maria Zanetti. Jackson impressed his employer with images printed from multiple blocks, dramatically reproducing paintings and sculpture in a two-dimensional format. He went on to have success designing and cutting woodcuts for book illustration for various Venetian publishers. This came to an end when Jackson learned that some of his designs had been stolen and the blocks printed under another name.

The Crucifixion after Tintoretto (1518-1594)

Fortunately, he met the wealth British banker and bibliophile Joseph Smith (ca. 1674-1770) who offered Jackson several commissions for reproductive prints of works in Smith’s art collection. The last, completed in 1739, was a multi-block or chiaroscuro reproduction of Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (the painting now in the National Gallery of Art, London). The success of this print led his friends Charles Frederick and Smart Lethieullier to propose a larger series of chiaroscuro prints reproducing the great paintings of the Venetian masters.

The Virgin in the Clouds and Six Saints after Titian (ca. 1488-1576)

The project took 4 ½ years, during which time Jackson proofed nearly 100 blocks to produce 24 plates after 17 paintings by such artists as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Leandro da Ponte Bassano, Jacopo Bassano, and Francesco da Ponte Bassano. This was not the first or only such project Jackson attempted but it was the only one to be successfully completed and published in a large edition.

Jackson’s book brought the Renaissance process of chiaroscuro printing back into favor and in 1754, he published a technical manual entitled, An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro. In it, Jackson comments “… there is a masterly and free Drawing [in chiaroscuro], a boldness of Engraving and Relief, which pleases a true Taste more than all the little Exactness found in the Engravings in Copper plates..”

Princeton’s copy of Jackson’s book has been disbound and digitized. The prints can be seen in their entirely at http://diglib.princeton.edu/xquery?_xq=getCollection&_xsl=collection&_pid=jacksonprints

Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple after Titian (ca. 1488-1576)

For more information, see: John Baptist Jackson (1701-1780): chiaroscuri dalla Collezione Remondini del Museo biblioteca archivio di Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza: La Serenissima, 1996) Marquand Library (SA) NE642.J13 M37 1996

Anthony Morris Family Tree, compiled by Anthony Saunders Morris, lithographed by L. Haugg, 1861. Graphic Arts division (GA) 2009- in process

Anthony Saunders Morris (1803-1885) must have had great interest in the history of his family because in the 1860s, he began compiling a complete Morris family tree. When he succeeded in documenting nine generations of male decedents, he hired lithographer Louis Haugg (1856-1894), one of Philadelphia’s leading printmakers, to draw the family tree in its entirety.

The result is this massive sixteen-plate panorama of an actual tree (approximately six by five feet), which holds all the names of the Morris family. Note that the men are the branches that continue the lineage and the women the foliage, only good for decoration.

Printed by F. Bourquin and Company on Chestnut Street, it is unclear how large an edition Morris commissioned. No other copy of this print is currently recorded.

“It is not unlikely that the day may arrive when the connoisseur of a future age shall turn over the pages of a book, and pause upon an aquatinta print, with the same solemn delight as those of our day are wont to do upon a woodcut of Albrecht Dürer, an etching of Hollar, or a production of any ancient engraver.”

At the time Samuel Prout (1783-1852) wrote these words, aquatint prints had taken over English book illustration, dominating it from 1790 to 1830. The leading publishers, such as Rudolph Ackermann, maintained stables of artists who turned-out watercolor drawings, which were converted to black and white aquatints by master printers, hand colored by cheaper technicians. Samuel Prout worked for Ackermann and others as a watercolorist, specializing in picturesque views for armchair travelers.

Prout’s real interest lay in the newer technique of lithography, being one of the first English artists to perfect the process. In 1817, when Ackermann wrote an article praising lithography in his Repository of the Arts, it was Prout who illustrated the text with an original lithographic print.

As the audience grew for Prout’s topographical views, so did his geographic range. Prout made frequent trips across the continent of Europe, producing multiple series of tinted lithographs with hand-colored highlights. Most prints celebrate towering Gothic cathedrals and other romantic architectural views rendered with astonishing detail. This is one such set with views from France, Switzerland, and Italy.

By the vigor, the delicacy and the certainty of his drawings, Meryon recalls what is best in the work of the early etchers. We have rarely seen represented with more poetry the solemnity peculiar to a great capital. -Charles Baudelaire 1859

Baudelaire was reacting to “Eaux-fortes sur Paris,” a series of 22 etchings documenting Paris before it was transformed into a modern city by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. Completed by the French printmaker Charles Meryon (1821-1868) between 1850 and 1854, the prints were rejected by the Salons of the time.

Meryon must have been grateful to receive a commission in the spring of 1856 from François Louis Alfred Pioche (1818-1872), a banker, investor and art collector, who traveled between his native Paris and his adopted home of San Francisco. Poiche asked Meryon to create a panoramic landscape of San Francisco, although the artist had never been there. For inspiration, he was given a five-daguerreotype panorama of the city (now in the Art Institute of Chicago), from which five large paper photographs were made for his use.

While much of the landscape was copied directly from the photographs, Meryon added a cartouche to the center foreground with allegorical figures of Abundance and Labor, as well as portrait medallions of Pioche and his partner Jules B. Bayerque. Meryon pulled the first proofs in September and finished some time that winter. Princeton’s copy is a rich, clean impression from the fourth of four states, measuring 185 x 950 mm.

Not long after finishing this panorama, the artist checked into the asylum in Charenton. Although he returned to Paris and his work several times, Meryon’s final years were spent in Charenton, where he died of self-starvation in 1868.

This single-volume biography originally published in 1852, has been extra illustrated with 208 additional engravings bound into a three-volume set. The prints include portraits of William Penn (1644-1718), his colleagues and contemporaries, and the landmarks from his life story.

The earliest print in this set is a portrait of Penn at age twenty-two, posed in armor for his father, an admiral in the Royal Navy. Penn never joined the military but instead joined the Religious Society of Friends, later known as the Quakers. He petitioned Charles II, King of England, and received a grant of land in America, north of Maryland. Penn suggested naming his territory Sylvania but the King wanted to honor Penn and so we call this area Pennsylvania.

Henry Martin, class of 1948, worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for more than forty-five years, publishing in the New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and many other magazines. He also had a single-panel comic strip, “Good News/Bad News,” which was nationally syndicated.

Martin had his first drawing accepted at the New Yorker in April 1950 but it was another ten years before his first cartoon was accepted there. It is, in fact, these drawings or “spots,” for which Martin is best represented in the magazine. A search of the New Yorker’s cartoon database reveals 188 cartoons but our archive of Martin’s drawings shows he made over 1,000 spots. These are the tiny drawings that fill the spaces above and below the stories, articles, and columns of the magazine.

In March of 2005, New Yorker editor David Remnick changed the handling of these spots (Martin was by then retired). The earlier spots Martin drew had no running narrative of their own; no connection with politics or current events or each other. They were visual poems living gloriously apart from daily life. This changed with the magazine’s 80th anniversary issue. The spots, now created by a series of artists, have their own narrative or running theme throughout an individual issue. This week, for instance, they are all about garbage.

We include a few here in the old style.

And one cartoon for good measure.

For some other Princeton University related Henry Martin cartoons, see: http://tigernet.princeton.edu/
~ptoniana/cartoons.asp

For an extended commentary on the redesign of the New Yorker, see http://www.aiga.org/
content.cfm/redesigning-the-new-yorker
-part-one?pff=2

Graphic Arts holds a number of works by the French artist Clément Pierre Marillier (1740-1808) including this print:

Claude Joseph Dorat (1734-1780), Fables nouvelles (Paris: Chez Delalain, 1773-1775). 99 vignettes and 99 culs-de-lampe after designs by C.P. Marillier, engraved by E. De Ghendt, Masquelier, Nee, Delaunay, Baquoy, Le Roy, Lebeau, and others. Graphic Arts (GAX) 2004-3296N.

In his twenties, Marillier left Dijon to study painting in Paris but failed to find success. He turned instead to graphic design, working on books, magazines, maps, and other projects where his complex images of imaginative scenes found great appreciation. From 1769 to 1789, Marillier designed prints for at least twenty books:

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1740-1814, Jenneval, ou Le Barnevelt françois, drame en cinq actes, en prose, 1769.
Louis Sébastien Mercier, 1740-1814, Olinde et Sophronie, drame héroîque en cinq actes et en prose, 1771.
Jacques Cazotte, 1719-1792, Le diable amoureux: nouvelle espagnole, 1772.
Claude Joseph Dorat, 1734-1780, Fables; ou, Allégories philosophiques, 1772.
Claude Joseph Dorat, 1734-1780, Fables nouvelles, 1773.
Arnaud Berquin, 1747-1791, Idylles, 1774.
Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, 1713-1796, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens & du commerce des Européens dans les deu, 1775.
Adrien Richer, 1720-1798, Théatre du monde, où, par des exemples tirés des auteurs anciens & modernes, les vertus & les, 1775.
Arnaud Berquin, 1747-1791, Romances, 1777.
Grécourt, 1683-1743, Œuvres choisies de Grécourt, 1777.
Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, 1689-1755, Oeuvres de Monsieur de Montesquieu, 1777.
Ovid, Les oeuvres galantes et amoureuses d’Ovide … , 1777.
Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375, Nimfale fiesolano: nel quale si contiene l’innamoramento di Affrico e Mensola: poemetto in ott, 1778.
Pliny, the Elder, Caii Plinii Secundi Historiae naturalis libris XXXVII, 1779.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744, Oeuvres complettes d’Alexandre Pope, 1779.
Claude Joseph Dorat, 1734-1780, Mélanges de poésies fugitives et de prose sans conséquence; suivis de Volsidor et Zulménie, 1780.
Cabinet des fees, ou, Collection choisie des contes des fees et autres contes merveilleux, 1785.
Louis Elisabeth, comte de Tressan, 1705-1783, Oeuvres choisies du comte de Tressan, 1787.
Sainte Bible, contenant l’Ancien et le Nouveau testament, 1789.

Artists have often made fun of politicians, royalty, and others by depicting them as monkeys. Here are a few examples.

Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937), Untitled, no date. Pen and ink on board. GA2007.00153.

George Cruikshank (1792-1878), The Genius of France, Expounding Her Laws to the Sublime People, April 4, 1815. Etching with hand-coloring. GA Cruikshank Cohn 1152. Gift of Richard W. Meirs, class of 1888

Lawson Wood (born 1878), A Good Egg Stays on the Job, no date. Published by “OSS” [United States Office of Strategic Services?]. Photomechanical poster. GA World War Posters.

Bernard Gillan (1856-1896), Untitled [U.S. Senator Thomas Platt as monkey], 1885. Pen and ink on board. GA2007.00106.

Columbia University chemistry professor Ogden Nicholas Rood, Princeton class of 1852, had a passion for the science of color. He published a number of influential books, including Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (Annex A P94.852.051.05) and Students’ Text-Book of Color (ND1259.R67).

Hood made a number of trips to Europe to do research and to paint. Graphic Arts recently acquired thirteen drawing after bas reliefs made by Hood while in Florence. Writing in The American Journal of Science (1903), Arthur Wright commented, “It may be added that Professor Rood’s work upon [Modern Chromatics] was greatly facilitated by his own experience as an artist. As early as his residence in Munich [ca. 1854-58] he had practiced painting in oil, and attached a high degree of proficiency. He had a great skill in drawing, and became expert in painting in water-colors, some of his pictures having been shown at the exhibitions of the Academy of Design in New York.”

Princeton also owns a small collection of letters written by Rood from New York and Germany, 1843-1902. Manuscripts Division CO602

This German engraving is being moved in our database from "created by" Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) to "printed by" Engelbrecht. It is a good example of printer's abbreviations and useful they are in identifying the print.

In the lower left hand corner of the print is: "C. Priv. S.C. Maj." which is the privilege statement: "Cum Privilegio Sacrae Caesareae Majestatis" or with the privilege of the Holy Imperial Majesty or Holy Roman Empire. This privilege is not only the authorization to publish, but the imperial printing privilege gave copyright protection to the publisher for a time.

On the right, Englebrecht's name is printed with "excud. A.V." or excudit Augusta Vindelicorum; that is, published in Augsburg, Germany. Engelbrecht was both an artist and the owner of a large print publishing house in Augsburg, and many prints are wrongly attributed to him for this reason. Although no artist is identified on the print, it could have been engraved by Johann Georg Ringlin, who worked closely with the Engelbrecht firm.

Some other useful abbreviations seen on prints include:

James Gillray (1757-1815), The National Parachute or John Bull Conducted to Plenty & Emancipation, 1802. Etching with hand coloring. GC014 box 7

An aeronautical collection of more than 400 items that span the decades from the fire balloons of the seventeen-hundreds to the prop-driven planes of the nineteen thirties has been given to Princeton University.

The collection of prints, correspondence, photographs, and models was assembled by Harold Fowler McCormick during the early decades of this century. It was given to Princeton by Alexander Stillman of Chicago, a relative of the McCormick family.

Mr. McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, the founder of the International Harvester Company, and a member of the Princeton Class of 1895, died in 1941.

The McCormick collection begins with a series of letters written by the 18th-century balloonist, Etienne Montgolfier, and ends with memorabilia of the collector’s own career in aviation.

Mr. McCormick’s interest in aviation stemmed from a meeting with the Wright brothers in France in the summer of 1908. He took his first flight two years later, and in 1911, helped organize the First International Aviation Meet, held at Grant Park, Ill.

In 1913, he became one of the earliest communters by air when he used a Curtiss hydroplane to travel between his home in Lake Forest, Ill, and Chicago. He named the craft Edith after his wife, the former Edith Rockefeller.

An article about the gift in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, 27, no. 3 (spring 1966): 143+ is available full text: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visualmaterials/pulc/pulcv27n_3.pdf

More description of the entire collection can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/h-a-ann.html

For information on the McCormick-Romme ‘Umbrella’ airplane, see http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/vought.html

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In 1924, Ralph Waldo Emerson Barton (1891-1931) was asked to serve as an advisory editor to Harold Ross for his new magazine The New Yorker, along with Marc Connelly, George Kaufman, Rea Irvin, Alice Duer Miller, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott. These artists and writers were expected to contribute material to be printed anonymously, in exchange for stock, while retaining rights for reprints themselves. In one week alone, in the late 1924s, Barton completed eighty-five drawings. He was at the height of his career and one of the highest paid artists working in New York City. His drawings are, for many, synonymous with the 1920s.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Barton’s drawings were published unsigned and few survive in their original format. Besides The New Yorker, he worked for Collier’s, The Delineator, Everybody’s magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Hearst’s International, Judge, Leslie’s Weekly, Liberty, New York Herald Tribune, Photoplay, Puck, Satire, Shadowland, Vanity Fair, and many more. He illustrated many books, including Droll Stories by Honoré de Balzac, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos, The Tattooed Countess by Carl Van Vechten, and his own God’s Country. He also made one film, at the urging of his friend Charlie Chaplin, entitled Camille: The Fate of a Coquette, starring Paul Robeson, Sinclair Lewis, George Jean Nathan, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Knopf, Ethel Barrymore, Somerset Maugham, and many of his other friends.

The drawings in the Graphic Arts Division were published in Judge under the section “Judge’s Rotogravure section; The News of the Globe in Pictures by Ralph Barton”. They are not included in any published listing of Barton’s work. We can only assume they are from the 1920s.

When Barton shot himself in 1931, he left two notes. The first, titled “Obit,” was an explanation of his suicide, which he attributed to melancholia. Barton wrote, “No one thing is responsible for this and no one person—except myself. If the gossips insist on something more definite and thrilling as a reason, let them choose my pending appointment with the dentist or the fact that I happened to be painfully short of cash at the moment.” The second note was to his housekeeper, leaving her $35 and an apology that it was all he had left.

John Updike (1932-2009) selected only a few, favorite artists to write about in The New Yorker, later republished in Just Looking, and one was Ralph Barton. “Barton’s caricatures are not idignant, like Daumier’s, or frenzied, like Gerald Scarfe’s,” he wrote, “they are decoratively descriptive.” Then, Updike quoted Barton speaking of his own work, “It is not the caricaturist’s business to be penetrating; it is his job to put down the figure a man cuts before his fellows in his attempt to conceal the writhings of his soul.”

Later, in a foreword to Bruce Kellner’s biography on Barton, Updike wrote

“In the fury of his life and career Barton was careless of his work; most of his originals are lost, destroyed by him or by the engravers whose indifferent, coarsely screened reproductions are all we have left. …A lost Manhattan and a lost decade live again in the particulars of Barton’s hectic career. The life was less happy than it should have been, considering its achievement; the best of Barton’s art is like a perfect flower, wiry and fluent, blooming in the wilderness of his era’s commercial art.”

Bruce Kellner, The Last Dandy, Ralph Barton: American Artist, 1891-1931 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, c1991) Firestone Library (F) NC139.B36 K45 1991

John Updike (1932-2009), Just Looking: Essays on Art (New York: Knopf; Distributed by Random House, 1989) Rare Books (Ex) N71 .U64 1989

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This album holds a collection of wood engravings used in books published by the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) of Philadelphia. Judging from the dates which occasionally occur, the period covered is from the early 1820s to 1831. All the cuts have been carefully organized chronologically and numbered in pen. Over 70 are by George Gilbert, along with designs by Reuben S. Gilbert, Christian F. Gobrecht (1785-1844), Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), and John Warner Barber (1798-1885).

This is book one of two volumes. The second album, beginning with 1831, is held by the Library Company of Philadelphia. Special thanks go to their rare book curator Cornelia King for her research on these sample books.

The ASSU was founded in 1824 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to promote early literacy and spiritual development of children, teaching them to read through the use of booklets published by the Union. The ASSU continued its publication program until l960 and some time later changed its name to the American Missionary Fellowship, which is how we know them today. Although the publications were meant to be nondenominational, many of the images tell biblical stories with a conservative leaning. No. 608 shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a note below: "Not to be used unless clothed."

This is a mezzotint engraving of Jonathan Belcher (1682-1757) made while he was Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire prior to becoming Governor of New Jersey and a strong supporter of the newly founded College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton University). Gov. Belcher gave the college 474 books from his private collection, making our library the sixth largest in the colonies.

“Concerning the Phillips portrait and the engraving of it, Belcher wrote from Boston on August 7, 1734, to his son, Jonathon Belcher, Jr., who was then in London: ‘I see you had rec’d my picture from Mr Caswall. I think it is not much like, tho’ a good piece of paint, done by Mr Phillips of Great Queen Street out of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I am surprised & much displeas’d at what your uncle writes me of Mr Newman & your having my picture done on a copperplate. How cou’d you presume to do such a thing without my special leave and order? You shou’d be wise and consider the consequences of things before you put ‘em in execution. Such a foolish affair will pull down much envy, and give occasion to your father’s enemies to squirt & squib & what not. It is therefore my order, if this comes to hand timely that you destroy the plate & burn all the impressions taken from it.”

Princeton University Library Chronicle 14, no.4 (Summer 1953): 172.