In 1922, the English writer George Somes Layard commented that: “A series of marks on a print is its diary: the fate and journey of many a masterpiece can be thereby traced until it finds at last its permanent home in the Museum.” Layard succinctly foreshadowed what might now be described as the materiality, agency, and lives of these art works: their materials and production; and the markings, annotations, and signs of use that connect the human stories of artist, printmaker, print publisher, dealer, collector, and collecting institution. The potency of these narratives is magnified when prints are considered not only as individual objects, but also within, and in concert with, extant print albums.

Before the second half of the eighteenth century, collectors most commonly stored and displayed their prints in albums: book-like volumes often housed as part of a library. Since then, changing institutional display and storage preferences have resulted in the now customary presentation of prints in individual sunk or recessed mounts, rather than bound en masse. As a result, intact albums of prints (especially those preserved in the arrangements determined by eighteenth-century collectors) are rare survivors.

Much important data about the assembly of print collections in the eighteenth century—once evident in the physical characteristics of intact albums—is now diminished or lost. These physical characteristics are the primary focus of this investigation. Adhesions, foliation, annotations, bindings, and signs of use (which are often overlooked by viewers or consciously excised from eighteenth-century print albums in institutional collections) can be as intriguing as the prints contained within the albums. These material features are also marks of identity and agency: they reveal the “lives” of the albums and the hand of the collector.

Sears Gallagher (1869-1955) was a draftsman, printmaker, and illustrator born in Boston. Gallagher was a founder of the Monhegan art colony.

The papers of draftsman, printmaker, and illustrator, Sears Gallagher measure 1.1 linear feet and date from circa 1882-2010. The collection consists of biographical information including awards and a scholarly biography; correspondence, primarily professional in nature, documenting the placement of works; professional files that document the management of studio practices including the printmaking process and the distribution and sale of prints; scrapbooks chronicling Gallagher's professional and family history in the form of clippings, photographs, and correspondence; printed material including clippings and commercial prints of watercolors; photographs including those of the artist and his studio; and artwork including numerous drawings on paper and sketchbooks documenting key moments of travel and artistic production.

**Please click on the 'External Link' below to learn more.

The Journal of the History of Collections has launched a Thematic Virtual Issue on the topic of Collecting Prints and Drawings. The collection compiles articles from past issues of the journal and is a useful resource for those with research interests in the history of works on paper and the people who collected them.

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In 1565, Samuel Quiccheberg included prints and drawings among the contents of his imaginary 'theatre' of 'artificial and marvellous things'.1 For Quiccheberg, the sheer variety of works on paper was the appeal of this type of material, which could encompass everything from watercolours, intaglio and relief prints of all manner of subjects, to maps and genealogical tables. It is prints and drawings, and their allure for collectors, which forms this second virtual issue drawn from the archives of the Journal of the History of Collections.

Just as Quiccheberg celebrated prints and drawings for their variety, so this collection of papers celebrates the diversity of their acquirers: the many dedicated collectors who formed important, intriguing and very personal groups of works. Among these are the early collections of Gabriele Vendramin, who used a fortune founded on soap-production to acquire the drawings of the leading artists of his day; of the Swiss doctor Felix Platter, who preserved the collection of his mentor Conrad Gessner, among them many of the preparatory drawings for Gessner's renowned publication the Historiae Animalium (1551); and of Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, who amassed not only prints, but also the copper plates from which they were made.

For the last few years of Orsini's life, his colleague at the papal court was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whose secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzo, amassed a vast and important collection of works on paper. For dal Pozzo, drawings and prints formed a 'Paper Museum', through which he sought to accumulate the riches of the natural and man-made worlds. Although dal Pozzo's zeal was notable, by the seventeenth century, collections of drawings and prints were increasingly common. In Leipzig later in the century, the architect Gottfried Wagner would amass 10,202 sheets which became one of the key holdings of the Dresden print room after his death. In the eighteenth century, like dal Pozzo, the artist Jan van Rymsdyk had aspirations to form his own small 'Museum', of artists' drawings.

Prints and drawings were not just stored in albums and portfolios: they could be framed alongside paintings and displayed on walls, or pasted into texts to provide illustration. In eighteenth-century Britain, concurrent fashions for portrait collecting and extra-illustrating texts saw market become'madness', with new prints issued to meet demand and increasing rarities fetching enormous prices. One enterprising cleric, the Revd John Brand, found an inventive way to participate in the latest craze without bankruptcy: he borrowed and carefully drew copies of the prints he coveted to form a unique and at the same time fashionable collection.

Beyond the individualities of collectors themselves, the study of the market for prints and drawings can illuminate our understanding of the polite world and its mores, of the complexities of connoisseurship, and of the production (and preservation) of satire as a barometer of a society. If this collection begins, chronologically, with Gabriele Vendramin and his exquisite sheets of fine art, so it ends with Erwin Swann, who sought to preserve the graphic art of satire in a collection of prints and drawings no less fascinating than those formed by his illustrious forebears.

Footnote 1: Mark A. Meadow and Bruce Robertson (eds and trans), The First Treatise on Museums. Samuel Quiccheberg's 'Inscriptiones', 1565 (Los Angeles, 2013).

Charles Heathcote Tatham and Joseph Gandy played important roles in early Nineteenth century British artistic world: Tatham for his contribution to the development of applied arts, Gandy for being John Soane’s projects graphic executor, as well as a truly eclectic artist, hard to classify in traditional canons. Apparently disconnected and distant from each other, the two architects shared the experience of the trip to Rome, which took place simultaneously in the years 1794-1796, but if they boarded the same ship, they also moved in two diametrically opposite directions once arrived in Rome. The letters sent home by the two young artists confirm this, telling two completely dissimilar experiences of the same Rome and the Ancient. A er returning home, between 1800 and 1806, both architects published some illustrated publications strongly linked to the recent trip. In both cases they are architectural model albums: two series of ’didactic’ engravings by Tatham, and two pattern books for rural buildings by Gandy. They are two extremely di erent editorial cases, but both based on the ’re-use’ of the Italian experiences of the authors and their personal interpretation of their time’s cult of antiquity.

Selling Andrew Jackson is the first book-length study of the American portrait painter Ralph E. W. Earl, who worked as Andrew Jackson’s personal artist from 1817 until Earl’s death in 1838. During this period Jackson held Earl in close council, even providing him residence at the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, and at the White House during his presidency. In this well-researched and comprehensive volume, Rachel Stephens examines Earl’s role in Jackson’s inner circle and the influence of his portraits on Jackson’s political career and historical legacy.

By investigating the role that visual culture played in early American history, Stephens reveals the fascinating connections between politics and portraiture in order to challenge existing frameworks for grasping the inner workings of early nineteenth-century politics. Stephens argues that understanding the role Earl played within Jackson’s coterie is critical to understanding the trajectory of Jackson’s career. Earl, she concludes, should be credited with playing the propagandistic role of image-shaper—long before such a position existed within American presidential politics. Earl’s portraits became fine art icons that changed in character and context as Jackson matured from the hero of the Battle of New Orleans to the first common-man president to the leader of the Democratic party, and finally to the rustic sage of the Hermitage.

Jackson and Earl worked as a team to exploit an emerging political culture that sought pictures of famous people to complement the nation’s exploding mass culture, grounded on printing, fast communications, and technological innovation. To further this cause, Earl operated a printmaking enterprise and used his portrait images to create engravings and lithographs to spread Jackson’s influence into homes and businesses. Portraits became vehicles to portray political allegiances, middle-class cultural aspirations, and the conspicuous trappings of wealth and power.

Through a comprehensive analysis of primary sources including those detailing Jackson’s politics, contemporary political cartoons and caricatures, portraits and prints, and the social and economic history of the period, Stephens illuminates the man they pictured in new ways, seeking to broaden the understanding of such a complicated figure in American history.

Rachel Stephens is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama. Her research investigates the art and visual culture of the antebellum era, particularly in the South. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Iowa.

Nineteenth-century Paris is often celebrated as the capital of modernity. However, this story is about cultural producers who were among the first to popularize and profit from that idea. Graphic Culture investigates the graphic artists and publishers who positioned themselves as connoisseurs of Parisian modernity in order to market new print publications that would amplify their cultural authority while distributing their impressions to a broad public.

Jillian Lerner's exploration of print culture illuminates the changing conditions of vision and social history in July Monarchy Paris. Analyzing a variety of caricatures, fashion plates, celebrity portraits, city guides, and advertising posters from the 1830s and 1840s, she shows how quotidian print imagery began to transform the material and symbolic dimensions of metropolitan life. The author's interdisciplinary approach situates the careers and visual strategies of illustrators such as Paul Gavarni and Achille Devéria in a broader context of urban entertainments and social practices; it brings to light a rich terrain of artistic collaboration and commercial experimentation that linked the worlds of art, literature, fashion, publicity, and the theatre.

A timely historical meditation on the emergence of a commercial visual culture that prefigured our own, Graphic Culture traces the promotional power of artistic celebrities and the crucial perceptual and social transformations generated by new media.

Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy.

A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837-38 Rebellions and Canada’s entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century.

Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.

In this video, we look at part of the printing process of one of the most important scientific documents of all time.

This short video, part of the 'Objectivity' series, highlights the research of Dr Katie Reinhart (CRASSH, Cambridge). The video features Dr Katie Reinhart, Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project "Making Visible: The Visual and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society." Join her in the basement of the Royal Society and learn about the printing process behind one of the most important scientific documents of all time!

Learn more about Katie's research and experience the online exhibition "Science Made Visible".

Cabinets of prints and drawings are found in the earliest art collections of Early Modern Europe. From the sixteenth century onwards, some of them acquired such fame that the necessity for an ordered and scientific display meant that a dedicated keeper was occasionally employed to ensure that fellow enthusiasts, as well as visiting diplomats, courtiers and artists, might have access to the print room. Often collected and displayed together with drawings, the prints formed a substantial part of princely collections which sometimes achieved astounding longevity as a specialised group of collectibles, such as the Florentine Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe at the Uffizi (GDSU).

Prints and drawings, both bought and commissioned, were collected by princes and by private amateurs. Like the rest of their collections, the prints and drawings were usually preserved and displayed as part of, or near, the owner’s library in close proximity to scientific instruments, cut gems or small sculptural works of art. Both prints and drawings not only documented an encyclopaedic approach to the knowledge available at the time, but also depicted parts of the collections in the form of a paper museum. Prints and drawings also served as a guide to the collections. They spread their fame, and the renown of their owners, across Europe and into new worlds of collecting, both East and West.

This volume explores issues such as: when, how and why did cabinets of prints and drawings become a specialised part of princely and private collections? How important were collections of prints and drawings for the self-representation of a prince or connoisseur among specialists and social peers? Is the presentation of a picture hanging in a gallery, for example by Charles Eisen for the Royal Galleries at Dresden, to be treated as documentary evidence? Are there notable differences in the approach to collecting, presentation and preservation of prints and drawings in diverse parts of the world? What was the afterlife of such collections up to the present day?