While compiling the Drawings Inventory for the AAS website I came up with this vivid Romantic (capital R) image in my head of nineteenth-century artists flocking to the great outdoors to draw from nature and of the AAS amassing this collection of amateur art spawned either from the sublime or from the creator’s imagination. I was so transfixed by this thought that the sheer idea of to-be-artists copying from prints never entered my mind – until I found attached to the back of an 1850s drawing by Mary A. Ladd Wilcox a note saying the drawing was “probably copied from an engraving.”
Needless to say, I set out to find this “alleged” engraving. For sure, Mary Ladd had parked herself down, sketch pad in hand, in front of Mount Vernon and created her art, right? Especially since it was so large? And so real? I (smugly) couldn’t find anything until I looked in an uncatalogued folder of Mount Vernon views and found an engraving by Archibald Dick – all thoughts of Wilcox traveling from Sharon, Vermont to our first President’s abode to be a Romantic-artist quickly diminished.
The Dick engraving was published for the Christian Family Annual out of New York; this got me thinking about not just copying from prints, those large published pieces which were framed and displayed, right? But of something smaller – the book illustration and even more “minor” – the periodical illustration. Following this new obsession I looked to a popular female periodical to find clues. Godey’s Lady’s Book of September 1831 states that yes, “in prints, which are taken from paintings, there is always a degree of strength given to the engraving” and that the artist, to produce such a drawing, is to make “an imitation, not a copy; – an exercise of the same process” suggesting how regular a practice this one. The drawing is definitely not one limited by national boundaries (though of an American-nation subject) – the “original” painting was created by a British artist and the final item we have was an “original” chalk drawing by a rural New Englander. Furthermore, Wilcox’s art continues to be part of this circular print culture where you can’t tell where one source ends and another begins.
My-self-made linear system between subject and artist (Wilcox sitting and looking at Mt. Vernon) that I had created in my head suddenly disappeared – it seems more likely that the painting was created of Washington’s home and tomb (by W.H. Brooke of England) followed by a British engraving by W.H. Capone, followed by an American engraving by Archibald Dick which was then circulated in a periodical(s) by the Christian Family Annual which was then picked up by Wilcox and drawn with variants of size and details (in accordance with conditions produced by periodical literature and/or drawings manuals?).
After the Wilcox piece, I wanted to find more of these examples of distribution and I am eager to figure out a way to document this successfully. Right now I have this odd kind of page (and I welcome suggestions on how to make it "work") where I try to trace the genealogy of certain drawings – but they don’t fit into a neat flow chart of material – making it all the more hybrid-ish and I think (yes...) cool.
Needless to say, I set out to find this “alleged” engraving. For sure, Mary Ladd had parked herself down, sketch pad in hand, in front of Mount Vernon and created her art, right? Especially since it was so large? And so real? I (smugly) couldn’t find anything until I looked in an uncatalogued folder of Mount Vernon views and found an engraving by Archibald Dick – all thoughts of Wilcox traveling from Sharon, Vermont to our first President’s abode to be a Romantic-artist quickly diminished.
The Dick engraving was published for the Christian Family Annual out of New York; this got me thinking about not just copying from prints, those large published pieces which were framed and displayed, right? But of something smaller – the book illustration and even more “minor” – the periodical illustration. Following this new obsession I looked to a popular female periodical to find clues. Godey’s Lady’s Book of September 1831 states that yes, “in prints, which are taken from paintings, there is always a degree of strength given to the engraving” and that the artist, to produce such a drawing, is to make “an imitation, not a copy; – an exercise of the same process” suggesting how regular a practice this one. The drawing is definitely not one limited by national boundaries (though of an American-nation subject) – the “original” painting was created by a British artist and the final item we have was an “original” chalk drawing by a rural New Englander. Furthermore, Wilcox’s art continues to be part of this circular print culture where you can’t tell where one source ends and another begins.
My-self-made linear system between subject and artist (Wilcox sitting and looking at Mt. Vernon) that I had created in my head suddenly disappeared – it seems more likely that the painting was created of Washington’s home and tomb (by W.H. Brooke of England) followed by a British engraving by W.H. Capone, followed by an American engraving by Archibald Dick which was then circulated in a periodical(s) by the Christian Family Annual which was then picked up by Wilcox and drawn with variants of size and details (in accordance with conditions produced by periodical literature and/or drawings manuals?).
After the Wilcox piece, I wanted to find more of these examples of distribution and I am eager to figure out a way to document this successfully. Right now I have this odd kind of page (and I welcome suggestions on how to make it "work") where I try to trace the genealogy of certain drawings – but they don’t fit into a neat flow chart of material – making it all the more hybrid-ish and I think (yes...) cool.
