Tag Archives: print culture

November 22, 2011

Early Takes on the Turkey

By daseger

Before the turkey became the top-heavy symbol of consumption, it was the very image of the New World and America. It comes as no surprise to me that Benjamin Franklin preferred the turkey over the eagle as the symbol and embodiment of the new nation, writing to his daughter in 1784 that “I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” A true original Native of America, like the pumpkin, the pineapple, and the porcupine, once-exotic entities that became more familiar and “domestic” with the passage of time.

The Turkey is a conspicuous image on this seventeenth-century map of Dutch America by William Blaeu, along with its equally American badgers. Europeans had already come to identify this flamboyant bird with the New World, perhaps because of its earlier inclusion (along with lots of other American animals) in Konrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium (1551-1587).

Turkeys are all over the place in the seventeenth century: in paintings and prints, and even on pottery. One of the most beautiful representations is not European at all, but an Indian painting of the turkey brought to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s court menagerie by a European embassy; clearly the turkey had a global reputation by this time.

Ustad Mansur, circa 1612. Victoria and Albert Museum

Here are some more seventeenth-century images of the exotic bird: a drawing by an anonymous Dutch artist from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and two chalk drawings from the British Museum. The “turkey-cock” in the center was drawn by Dutch artist Jan Griffier as a study for a later painting (see below), while the last turkey resided in another royal menagerie: that of King Louis XIV at Versailles.

And here is Griffier’s paining, completed in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The turkey is shown along with other birds that are not native to Britain, where Griffier lived and worked. So it was apparently still a rare and cosmopolitan specimen, and a symbol of wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Jan Griffier, A Turkey and other Fowl in a Park, 1710. Tate Collection.

I don’t usually think of the turkey as “song bird”, but a particularly beautiful illustration of a “crested turkey cock” is included in Eleazer Albin’s three-volume History of English song-birds, and such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and Esteemed for their Singing (1741).

Indeed, by the time we get to Benjamin Franklin’s day, the general depiction of the turkey is one of an elegant and exotic bird, resident in all the best landscape parks. Hardly a modern turkey. I’m beginning to think that the long decline of the Ottoman Empire, accompanied by satirical characterizations of its most central country, led to the deterioration of the bird’s image as well. Caricatures of the bird/country (like those below) begin to be a lot more prevalent than naturalist ones (like those above) after the turn of the nineteenth century.

You get the general idea: poor Turkey/turkey being carved up and threatened by the European powers in British Museum satirical prints from 1802, 1803, and 1828: I could download many more. Franklin’s “courageous” bird is noble no more; maybe this is what happens when you take something out of its native environment!

3 Comments | tags: Art, books, holidays, maps, print culture | posted in Culture

November 20, 2011

Political Pumpkins

By daseger

Here is the first of a series of Thanksgiving-related posts, although this particular one doesn’t really have much to do with the holiday at all: only pumpkins. There is something about the pumpkin–the word, the shape, the associations–that renders it particularly suitable for satire and caricature, political and otherwise. You can place a pumpkin in a scene and immediately send forth a message, without words. The image conjures up nativist, patriotic associations for Americans, while the Cinderella connection and sheer rotundity seem to be the central message of European illustrations. I put “pumpkin” in the search engines of some of my favorite digital archives and this is what I got, in chronological order:

First off, a too-easy “pumpkin”: poor Daniel Lambert, the largest man in Britain, who was forced to put himself on display out of extreme poverty in the early nineteenth century. He died at age 39 and 739 pounds in 1809.

Two pieces of political ephemera from the Library of Congress: a sheet music cover of the “Know Nothings Quick Step” dated 1854, featuring the American symbols of pumpkin, turkey and badger framing the “European invaders” who were so threatening to the anti-Immigration Know Nothing Party, and a Civil War-era pictorial envelope of former General George McClellan, who ran against Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election after being relieved of his military duties; I assume this is a pro-Lincoln piece.

An 1871 caricature of French Third Republic minister Ernest Picard, from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Finally, two illustrations from Puck Magazine (1871-1918), always a source of great historical images: “Uneasy Turks” from 1908 (a time of popular revolution in Turkey not unlike the “Arab Spring”) and “Thanksgiving: a study in Proportion” from 1912. The latter seems to be a rather modern commentary on the trivialization of the holiday: a very small church is dwarfed by material symbols of the day’s amusements: feasting (pumpkin and turkey), entertainment (theater mask), and sports (golf clubs, shotgun and riding crop).

2 Comments | tags: Culture, ephemera, print culture | posted in History

November 11, 2011

Armistice Day

By daseger

As the enormity of loss in the Civil War created Memorial Day, the traumatic experience of World War One, the “Great War”, led to Armistice Day, celebrated in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries as “Remembrance Day” and in the US as Veterans Day after 1954. Remembrance Day is marked by a two-minute collective silence, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and the placement of poppies, representing both blood (death) and life in Flanders’ fields.

I can understand why Armistice Day was changed to Veterans’ Day in the United States, as the term “Armistice” specifically refers to World War I and a more general name was needed for the national holiday after World War II and the Korean War. But the wars of the first half of the twentieth century were “total wars” demanding contributions and sacrifice on the part of the entire population, so I think I prefer the even more-inclusive “Remembrance Day”. The posters below, from 1917-1918 and the Library of Congress, illustrate how the home front supported the war front during the Great War.

Eat less, waste nothing, fill in for the boys, buy war bonds and stamps; even children had their part to play:

The Food Will Win the War message/mission must have been a drumbeat, enforced by ration cards like the examples below. The second card is from the impressive archive of local collector and historian Nelson Dionne.

Mr. Dionne also sent along this amazing photographic collage by commercial photographer Leland Tilford of the new draftees of Salem leaving for the war, so determined. Many of these young men would be dead within a few years, either from the conflict itself or from some disease contracted on the field, in the trenches, or in a military hospital. When browsing through the Report of the Commission on Massachusetts’ Part in the World War, Part II: The Gold Star Record of Massachusetts (1929), it was immediately apparent just how many soldiers from Salem (over half the casualties I surveyed) died from an unidentified “disease”, most likely the deadly post-war flu pandemic.

When the soldiers of the Great War returned, if they returned, it was to a grateful nation, parades, and the first national programs for veterans. Unfortunately, the Great War was only the first World War, and as the twentieth century produced more wars and more veterans, Armistice Day evolved into Veterans Day, a day of reflection and remembrance.

Scenes from a post-war world: Department of Labor poster and “Back to the Farm” (with a prostheses) exhibit, 1918-1919 (Library of Congress) and an Armistice Day parade on Tremont Street in Boston, 1929 (Boston Public Library).

9 Comments | tags: ephemera, holidays, Library of Congress, print culture | posted in History, Salem

November 5, 2011

Guy Fawkes, Then and Now

By daseger

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November. Today is an important British holiday: Guy Fawkes Day, commemorating the foiling of the 1605 plot hatched by a group of Catholic conspirators to blow up the House of Lords upon the occasion of the opening of Parliament, when King James I and his family were in attendance. Even though the plot was led by a zealous English Catholic named Robert Catesby, his accomplice Guy Fawkes somehow became more identified with the conspiracy. The unsuccessful plot (and its holiday), along with the earlier attack of the Spanish Armada and the machinations of the later Stuarts, fueled English anti-Catholicism for quite some time.

Two early seventeenth-century broadsides from the British Museum: the Conspirators and their fate; God points out Guy Fawkes as he approaches the House of Lords.

The Gunpowder Plot (along with its Day and Bonfire Night) have strict historical associations but have also been used in more metaphorical (and secular) ways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to raise a collective patriotic awareness of any attack on Britain. No one could have been more threatening to Great Britain than Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, and so here he is strung up alongside “Guy Faux” in a Thomas Rowlandson print from 1813.

Two centuries later, Guy Fawkes seems to have evolved from a seditious conspirator against Britain to a rebellious liberator for Britain, or at least the British people (and even the global 99% around the world). This remarkable development is largely due to the V for Vendetta comic books in general and 2006 film in particular, which broadcast the “Guy Fawkes mask” around the world and made it a symbol of popular movements. Guy Fawkes masks are clearly playing a prominent role in Occupy London, and not only on Guy Fawkes Day. It certainly is an interesting time to be a historian!

Occupy London protesters with their masks in October, from the Time Out blog and Ed London Photography.

6 Comments | tags: England, Popular Culture, print culture, Seventeenth Century | posted in History

September 26, 2011

Trade Cards, Take Two

By daseger

I’ve made a few additions to my trade card collection over the summer, and found some nice early examples in various archives. So it seemed like time for another post, as my last one on these early business cards was months ago. So many of these cards were produced in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that you can easily get lost in a sea of paper if you are thinking about starting a collection, so it’s best to narrow down your interests–by location, businesses, images, era, etc..I am always on the lookout for Salem cards, of course, as well as drums, horseshoes, elephants and anything to do with upholstery and upholsterers.

I found a few cards for Frank Cousins, my favorite turn-of-the-century Salem entrepreneur/photographer, this summer, including drum and horseshoe images. Very exciting. These both date from the 1890s; I particularly like the Who is Frank Cousins? tagline–it seems quite modern.

Some more Salem items. Early trade cards are impossible to find (they are ephemeral after all) so the best place to look for them is in the collections of historical museums and libraries. The two cards below, from the first decade of the nineteenth century, represent two businesses that were flourishing in Salem’s golden age of prosperity. As you can see the first card (from Mystic Seaport) is showing its age, while that of Jabez Baldwin, a prosperous silversmith and clockmaker (from the American Antiquarian Society), still looks pretty good.

Much more attainable cards include these two colored cards from the end of the nineteenth century. I have no idea why strange-looking–even scary–clowns were good for business but they pop up quite often on trade cards. These are not images I collect but I can’t seem to avoid them.

I can find lots of clowns, but very few upholstery trade cards, which is what I’m really looking for. I love this great eighteenth-century example from the Victoria & Albert Museum: what a great image and historical source. A century before photography, it’s an (albeit idealistic) window into Christopher Gibson’s London upholstery shop, with both customers and craftsmen present. Below the Gibson card is a much less interesting one for the Boston upholsterers Copp & Pear from the later nineteenth century and the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. No Salem upholsterers yet.

There’s another clown in this last card, but at least he is accompanied by two elephants! There’s quite a few trade cards with elephant images (owing to the popularity of Jumbo, I think), but like this one, they’re all for national businesses and brands. I’d really like to find a local, less-standardized example.

7 Comments | tags: Collectibles, ephemera, print culture, Salem | posted in History, Paper

September 16, 2011

The Renaissance Rhinoceros

By daseger

Albrecht Durer’s supposedly-realistic rhinoceros is featured prominently in the new exhibition at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum, “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, as well as in its companion catalog (in fact it’s on the cover), and with good reason: horned beasts were the most fantastic of all creatures in medieval bestiaries, and with the coming of the Renaissance their existence was either verified or disproved. The appearance of Durer’s rhinoceros in print was part of this process, and also a great example of the Renaissance merger of art and science, two pursuits that seem incompatible today.

The exhibition also features an amazing print showing several men measuring a beached whale on a Dutch beach, another illustration of a great beast that was now the object of scientific scrutiny rather than passive wonder. Contrast this whale with illustrations from two thirteenth-century bestiaries in the collection of the British Library and you can easily see the difference of attitude. The two medieval whales are depicted in standard fashion as ” islands”, based on the legend of Saint Brendan the Navigator who awoke one morning during his long sea voyage on what he thought was an island but was really a whale.

Whales: Anonymous after Hendrick Goltzius, Stranded Whale at Zandvoort, 1594. Harvard Art Museum, Light Outerbridge Collection, Richard Norton Memorial Fund; British Library Manuscripts Harley 3244 & 4751.

In addition to prints of animals, the exhibition features maps and charts and illustrations of all the new scientific instruments of the age. Of course, portraiture is a distinctly Renaissance genre, and rather than the usual royals and nobles we see a portrait print of mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Petri van Deventer with all the tools of his profession.

Nicolaus Petri van Deventer by Hendrik Goltzius, 1595.

Medicine was another fledgling science of the sixteenth century, an age of “new” threats like syphilis (“the French pox”) and gunpowder and old ailments like the plague and smallpox. It was also an age of intense anatomical analysis and speculation, represented in the exhibition’s “skeleton portrait” by Philip Galle and close-up of cranial surgery from a contemporary “field manual for the treatment of wounds”.

Skeleton from Philip Galle’s “Instruction and Fundamentals of Good Portraiture”, Antwerp, 1598. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; “Instruments for Use in Cranial Surgery” from Hans von Gersdorff and Hans Wechtlin the Elder, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, Strasbourg, Hans Schott, 1540. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Print and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe runs through December 10, 2011 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was curated by Susan Dackerman, the Carl A. Weyerhauser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums. A closing symposium will be held on December 2-3, 2011.

3 Comments | tags: Art, Local Events, print culture, Renaissance | posted in History

August 25, 2011

Slug Slayers

By daseger

We’ve been fortunate to have had quite a bit of rain here in the Northeast, consequently the soil is moist and the plants are green. The garden looks pretty good for late August, except for the slug bites evident on many of my leafy plants. It is definitely slug season out there: every morning I awake to slime on my brick paths and pockmarked plants, evidence of their nocturnal feeding frenzy. I didn’t turn over the soil enough in the spring (to disrupt their larvae), I didn’t encircle my hostas with copper wire over which the slugs cannot slither past; I let them in and now there are really there. Now my only hope is beer (or better yet, stout) traps placed throughout the garden, as the salt method is a little too intense (face to face) for me.

Garden Pests (including slugs) from Joris Hoefnagel's Archetypa studiaque patris (1592)

More slugs and pests: the entire Archetypa is at the University of Strasbourg's Digital Library

Or is it? I hunted for some good slug-slaying advice and found plenty in my stack of gardening books and on the web. I particularly like the “Slug Fest” post from The Medieval Garden Enclosed, the Cloisters Museum and Gardens’ blog, and this article contains a great description of the effectiveness of nematode worms. They sound great, but do I want even more slimy things in the garden? I like to seek solutions to practical problems in the past, so I also turned to my treasure trove of early modern gardening texts. For the past few years, I’ve been writing a book on practical expressions of Renaissance culture in England, and have found that “how-to” gardening guides really exemplify the spirit of what I am trying to capture. Three authors in particular, Thomas Hill, Leonard Mascall, and William Lawson, have something to say about garden pests in particular and slugs in general.

None of these guys are offering new and original advice; in typical Renaissance fashion, they borrow heavily from classical authors and their continental counterparts, but they are all very practical, offering step-by-step instructions on how to plant, cultivate, and harvest a garden. They claim to be exposing long-lost horticultural “secrets” via the new medium of print. Hill, born about 1528, is the earliest of the authors, and his two garden books, The Profitable arte of gardening (first published in the 1560s) and The Gardeners Labyrinth (1577 and after) are among the most popular of all English books in the sixteenth century.

Hill proposes a multi-phased defensive plan against slugs and other “creeping things”. Seeds should be soaked in various herb waters in the shell of a snail, dried in the shell of a tortoise, then planted. Young plants in the garden should be protected by the presence of plants that repel creeping things, including mint, fitch (not sure what this is, but it is always referred to as “the bitter Fitch”), rocket, garlic (vampire slugs!) and onions. If the slugs still appear, Hill recommends applications of ashes (preferably from a fig tree), and a pungent mixture of Ox or Cow urine mixed together with the “mother of oyle Olive”. As a last resort, the gardener should “fix river crevisses with nails in many places of the Garden”. Impaling slugs sounds like an icky, though satisfying, option.

Leonard Mascall disappointed me with his slug solution, which basically amounted to hand-picking slugs off the plants in the very early morning before they go into their dark hiding places for the day. I was disappointed because Mascall is becoming the hero of my book due to the sheer diversity of practical information he dispensed in the latter part of the sixteenth century: he published tracts not only on horticulture but also on animal husbandry, fishing, health, and even stain removal. It was his Booke of Engines and trappes to take polcats, buzzardes, rattes, mice, and all other kindes of vermine and beastes whatsoever (1590) that gave me hope that he might have some sort of secret weapon against slugs, but no. Apparently slithering creatures are difficult to catch in traps.

In the seventeenth century, William Lawson’s popular New Orchard and Garden, with its companion volume (and one of the first gardening manuals to be addressed specifically to women), The Country House-Wifes Garden, recommended coal ashes and “sharp gravel” as slug preventatives; Lawson clearly did not want his “house-wifes” to get their hands dirty. So that’s it for my Renaissance experts: it is not until the next century that lime and the “cabbage method” (slugs love cabbage leaves, so lay them out at night for the slugs to “pasture” on, then scoop them up in the morning) appear, and much more toxic methods in the centuries that followed. I think I’ll stick with the beer.

3 Comments | tags: gardening, Home, print culture, Renaissance | posted in History, Home

August 9, 2011

Mr. Allen’s Amazonian Lily

By daseger

In the summer of 1853, an Amazonian water-lily blossomed in Salem, the second to be cultivated in North America, under the careful watch of amateur botanist John Fisk Allen (1807-76). Descended from several Salem shipping families, Allen had the means to pursue various horticultural pursuits, and he maintained a greenhouse on Flint Street (not far from his Chestnut Street residence) where he cultivated several varieties of grapes as well as tropical flowers. He is part of what I am realizing was an active and influential botanical circle in nineteenth-century Salem, with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle, Robert Manning, right in the center. Allen wanted to share his success with the world, or at least his world, so he commissioned America’s first chromolithographic printer, Boston-based William Sharp, to produce six detailed plates of the lily for inclusion in his account of its cultivation, Victoria Regia; or The Great Water Lily of America (Boston, 1854).

I have seen a really nice edition of this volume in person, and the plates below (from the Internet Archive digital edition) do not do justice to the real thing. They are really stunning, but apparently Sharp also took a bit of artistic license. Allen’s text is interesting as well, as he follows the rules of strict scientific observation and tells his readers everything the lily was doing that Salem summer long ago, down to the minute.

The first two cycles of the plant’s growth:

From first flowering through full bloom:

1 Comment | tags: Art, Chestnut Street, horticulture, print culture | posted in History, Salem

July 25, 2011

The Beginning of Branding

By daseger

About two-thirds of the way through my summer graduate course on the Expansion of Europe in the early modern era we have already identified three examples of early branding, at least a century before this modern form of advertising is supposed to have been invented. First, we have the logo of the Dutch East India Company, very visible on all Company ships from the early seventeenth century, then we have the brand of piracy, the immediately-recognizable skull-and-crossbones, and last but not least, Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist medallion, first appearing in the later eighteenth century in Britain and then crossing the Atlantic to appear in American anti-slavery materials.

One of the world’s first multinational corporations, organized for long-distance trade to the Indian Ocean and beyond, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) became the chief importer of Asian goods and wares into Europe in the seventeenth century, opening the doors that Salem ships would sail through two centuries later. The Dutch were the only Europeans that the Japanese would trade with, and their close commercial connection is evidenced by these two items: an eighteenth-century hand-colored woodblock print (with the VOC logo clearly visible on the pale flag in the center) and a late seventeenth-century Arita charger made for the European market (from Christies):

Everyone is familiar with the pirate flag, and I wrote an earlier post on its early history. The flag below, dating from the later eighteenth century, is from the Museum of London’s ongoing exhibition Pirates: the Captain Kidd Story. This logo’s evolution from piracy to poison is another story altogether.

And here is another famous eighteenth-century logo,one of the first political brands and a transatlantic one at that: the pioneering industrialist Josiah Wedgwood’s Am I Not A Man And A Brother medallion, made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the 1780s. It became very fashionable and effective in Britain, and crossed the Atlantic after 1800. Below is an original Wedgwood slave medallion from the Victoria & Albert Museum, and a woodcut illustration from John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1837 abolitionist poem Our Countrymen in Chains (Library of Congress).

These examples certainly predate modern advertising, but I think we can go even further back to see the origins of branding, at least to the emergence of printing and printers’ trademarks, or devices, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unique devices were fashioned by printers as marketing tools in this competitive new industry, and discerning buyers/readers would look for established marks. The dolphin and anchor device of the famous Venetian printer-publisher Aldus Manutius certainly helped to establish his “brand”, but my favorite device is the cat and mouse (rat?) mark of his fellow Italian printer Melchoirre Sessa (fl. 1510-35).

Sources of Devices: “First Impressions” Digital Exhibition at the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester (Manutius–you can also make your own mark there) and the University of Florida’s Printers’ Devices Database (Sessa).

Leave a comment | tags: abolitionism, advertising, Antiques, Japan, print culture | posted in Design, History

June 23, 2011

Paper Plates

By daseger

When looking into the life of a Revolutionary War-era Salemite named Ezra Northey I came across of bookplate of his and in typical fashion, went off on a tangent, chasing ex libris plates through the centuries. Book plates are interesting because they exist at the intersection of art history and book history, reflecting changing style motifs like any other art form. I am no expert, but the vast majority of them (before 1800) seem to have heraldic formats, with coats of arms and mottos. After all, these are personal statements: ex libris (from the library of …..insert name). These heraldic bookplates seem rather formulaic to me; I prefer the simple and pictorial styles of the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bookplate is by no means a modern invention, however; it actually predates the book but really takes off in the sixteenth century when Renaissance engravers like Albrecht Durer crafted very individual images for their patrons.

The bookplates below begin with a Durer example and then jump forward to Northey’s 1795 plate. Except for where noted, they are all from digitized collections from two Delaware libraries: the Winterthur Library and the William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection at the University of Delaware.

Albrecht Durer's 1524 bookplate for Willibald Pirckheimer, Victoria & Albert Museum.

I included the armorial bookplate below, from Winterthur, just because I like the motto, which loosely translates to: neither overjoyed nor overanxious. A nice outlook on life! Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) was also an important Revolutionary War-era publisher and founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

The late nineteenth-century bookplate of another prominent Massachusetts man, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

After 1900, the pictorial style really dominates in bookplates, and all the early twentieth-century aesthetic styles appear: Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts, Art Deco and expressionism. Below are examples from 1900-1932, all from Winterthur except the last: