from original to print...and back again

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.

The Scope of the Artifact

I'm just back from the fabulous Society of Early Americanists conference in Bermuda. Here is a completely gratuitous photo (thanks, Jeremy!) of I site that I didn't even see and that has absolutely nothing to do with this posting.

So, one day when I wasn't wandering the beach (sadly, I never did get to the beach) I had the pleasure of hearing a paper delivered by Jonathan Senchyne who is currently completing his dissertation at Cornell University. Senchyne presented on rag content in early modern paper and the textual evidences of that material reality in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. (Take another look at "Author to Her Book," and you will begin to see that presence!) During his presentation, Senchyne offered us the startling image of a page from the Library of Congress copy of Tenth Muse with a piece of unprocessed rag still clearly visible in the paper. One of the great pleasures of doing book history scholarship in the archive is that there are still such revelations to be granted by the artifact. As Senchyne presents it, the rag in the page at the Library of Congress is beautiful emblem not only of the dependence of the paper industry upon domestic sphere but also a reminder that Bradstreet was – like other early modern readers and writers – savvy about the international, material contexts of print production.

The image of this book put me in mind of another artifact. The American Antiquarian Society owns a 1678 Boston imprint of Bradstreet’s poems, and the covers of this volume are stiffened with printer’s waste paper. Clearly visible within the stretched leather edges of the inside cover are the discarded pages of what appears to be an Algonquian language catechism. Here we see Bradstreet’s poems, originally printed in England, now reprinted in New England with posthumous additions, all bound up in the materiality of European-Indian encounter and the rising local print economy. To me, this volume has always served as a material emblem of the early history of New England printing.

Hearing Senchyne’s account of the rags in the page, I was reminded that there are many such material emblems out there to tantalize our historical imagination. I began to think more about the role of the artifact in book history approaches to literary scholarship. Specifically, how do we deal with the serendipity and idiosyncrasy of the material archive? How broadly can we make claims based on individual cases? How do we put two disparate emblems – rags in a book and a book bound in an Indian language catechism, for example – into dialogue with each other? How do we theorize the meaning of what is extant and, more problematically, what is no longer extant?

Just some thoughts in my post-Bermudian, post-SEA glow. Chime in if you wish.