The "Psycho Beautigraph" etchings of Birmingham, AL, artist Felix Benjamin Gaines (1908–1991) are something of a mystery. His portrait of George Washington Carver offers some interesting challenges, beginning with identifying how it was made and how it relates to other prints of the period, both commercial and artistic. Presumably the term "psycho" refers to the psychology of the portrait's sensitive investigation of character. The background texture of the image resembles the cross-hatched fibers of a peanut shell, one of Carver's primary subjects for his experiments, and Gaines described some of his portraits using the term "peanut etching." It seems he made very detailed pen-and-ink drawings that were reproduced as photo-lithographs.
Gaines marketed his prints to audiences in the American south. During the late 1940s he planned to distribute his portrait of Dr. Carver to black schools and churches. He used Carver's image as a model to commemorate him as a great scientist and humanitarian and to encourage young people to seek higher education as a means to achieve racial tolerance and a better understanding between the races. After posting this blog in February 2015, we heard from some descendants and learned that Gaines was a muralist as well as a printmaker. He was involved in WPA art programs and later worked as an art teacher.

This blog introduces the talented poster artist Ethel Reed (1874-1912) and recounts her remarkable success. One of the most talented and prolific artists of the 1890s, she made her name during the poster craze of the period. She produced book illustrations, cover designs, and more than 25 posters, mostly in just two years, 1895 and 1896. Her creative burst earned her international recognition and she traveled to Europe and completed a few commissions for British publications through about 1898. Then she disappeared from the historical record until a 2013 biography by William Peterson detailed her sad end.

In 1849 the Smithsonian purchased the Marsh Collection of European engravings. Not only the first collection of any kind to be acquired by the new Institution, it was also the first public print collection in the nation. Although the uncertainty of the Smithsonian's mission in the early years complicated its motivation for purchasing the collection, the Marsh Collection represented an important symbol of cultural authority.
The prints formed part of the library of Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), a member of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents. The book recounts Marsh’s growing connoisseurship in the context of the art market of the 1840s. Remarkably, he made all his purchases in the U.S. and did not visit Europe until after he sold the collection. After a serious fire at the Smithsonian in 1865, portions of the collection were deposited at the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Efforts to reclaim it began in the 1880s, as a new generation of Smithsonian staff expanded the National Museum, but they achieved only partial success. A number of the prints remain at the Library of Congress. As the story continues, it treats the growth of the art market after the Civil War with particular emphasis on the reception and exhibition of prints nationwide.
Through the example of the Marsh Collection, the book explores the cultural values attributed to prints in the 19th century, including their influence on visual culture at a time when collecting styles were moving from an individual's private contemplation of artworks to wider public venues of exposition in museums and reception by multiple audiences. The history of the first Smithsonian collection informs an important stage in the development of American cultural identity and in the formation of the Smithsonian as a national institution.

"Creativity and Reproduction" discusses the role and status of graphic artists at the French academy, the Grand Prix de Rome for engravers, and their ensuing sojourn in Italy. The study demonstrates that the reformed academy in the early nineteenth century valued an interdisciplinary artistic education. Such training enabled artists to create original work that engaged with current aesthetic and cultural concepts.

Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot—a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiously engaged with the potential of the new print medium to give an account of their experience.

The Peregrinatio also aspired to rouse readers to a new crusade against Islam by depicting a contest in the Mediterranean between the Christian bastion of the city of Venice and the region’s Muslim empires. This crusading rhetoric fit neatly with the state of the printing industry in Mainz, which largely subsisted as a tool for bishops’ consolidation of authority, including selling the pope’s plans to combat the Ottoman Empire.

Taking an artist on such an enterprise was unprecedented. Reuwich set a new benchmark for technical achievement with his woodcuts, notably a panorama of Venice that folds out to 1.62 meters in length and a foldout map that stretches from Damascus to Sudan around the first topographically accurate view of Jerusalem. The conception and execution of the Peregrinatio show how and why early printed books constructed new means of visual representation from existing ones—and how the form of a printed book emerged out of the interaction of eyewitness experience and medieval scholarship, real travel and spiritual pilgrimage, curiosity and fixed belief, texts and images.

The colourful heraldic devices in the Book of St Albans (1486) have long been celebrated as the first and only images printed in colour in England until the mid-1700s, when technical breakthroughs allowed pictures to be printed in colour on a commercial scale. The 250-year gap between these landmarks of the history of English colour printing has been explained with reference to the absence of colour printing technologies or austere Reformation tastes, for instance. But images were indeed printed in colour in England throughout the sixteenth century, circulating in perhaps thousands of individual impressions. Because all known examples are illustrations or visual elements in books and because there is no standard descriptive vocabulary for their colour printing, this printed colour has hidden in plain sight until now.

This is the first ever exhibition on colour printmaking in Tudor England (1485-1603). These brightly printed pictures transform our understanding of the spread of technologies of visual communication in the English Renaissance, and more generally, in early modern Europe. Each theme explores a different technical approach; each object provides another piece of the story. The exhibition presents aspects of Dr Elizabeth Upper’s research as the 2012/13 Munby Fellow of Bibliography. Access to the Library’s collections on the same terms as the members of its permanent staff, a unique feature of the Fellowship, allowed her to search for these vivid images in the thousands of sixteenth-century English books in the Rare Book vaults.