Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
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Item Ships From: Wisconsin
September
By Harold Altman
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Harold Altman was born in New York City in 1924. He attended the Art Students League, the Black Mountain College, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and was a graduate of ...
Category
Late 20th Century Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
19th century color lithograph landscape figures horseback house scene trees sky
By Nathaniel Currier
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present print is one of several examples produced for Nathaniel Currier by his longtime collaborator Frances F. "Fanny" Palmer. Harry T. Peters wrote of her: "There is no more interesting and appealing character among the group of artists who worked for Currier & Ives than Fanny Palmer. In an age when women, well-bred women in particular, did not generally work for a living Fanny Palmer for years did exacting, full-time work in order to support a large and dependent family ... Her work ... had great charm, homeliness, and a conscientious attention to detail."
One of a series of four prints showing American country life in different seasons, the image presents the viewer with a picturesque view of a successful American farm. In the foreground, a gentleman rides a horse with a young boy before a respectable Italianate country house. Two women and a young girl pick flowers in the garden and several farm workers attend to their duties. Beyond are other homes and a city on the coast.
16.63 x 23.75 inches, artwork
28.13 x 33.38 inches, frame
Entitled bottom center "American Country Life - May Morning"
Signed in the stone, lower left "F.F. Palmer, Del."
Signed in the stone, lower right "Lith. by N. Currier"
Copyrighted lower center "Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1855 by N. Currier in the Clerk's office of the Southern District of N.Y."
Inscribed bottom center "New York, Published by N. Currier 152 Nassau Street"
Framed to conservation standards using silk-lined 100 percent rag matting and Museum Glass with a gold gilded liner, all housed in a stained wood moulding.
Nathaniel Currier was a tall introspective man with a melancholy nature. He could captivate people with his piercing stare or charm them with his sparkling blue eyes. Nathaniel was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on March 27th, 1813, the second of four children. His parents, Nathaniel and Hannah Currier, were distant cousins who lived a humble yet spartan life. When Nathaniel was eight years old, tragedy struck. Nathaniel’s father unexpectedly passed away leaving Nathaniel and his eleven-year-old brother Lorenzo to provide for the family. In addition to their mother, Nathaniel and Lorenzo had to care for six-year-old sister Elizabeth and two-year-old brother Charles. Nathaniel worked a series of odd jobs to support the family, and at fifteen, he started what would become a life-long career when he apprenticed in the Boston lithography shop of William and John Pendleton.
A Bavarian gentleman named Alois Senefelder invented lithography just 30 years prior to young Nat Currier’s apprenticeship. While under the employ of the brothers Pendleton, Nat was taught the art of lithography by the firm’s chief printer, a French national named Dubois, who brought the lithography trade to America.
Lithography involves grinding a piece of limestone flat and smooth then drawing in mirror image on the stone with a special grease pencil. After the image is completed, the stone is etched with a solution of aqua fortis leaving the greased areas in slight relief. Water is then used to wet the stone and greased-ink is rolled onto the raised areas. Since grease and water do not mix, the greased-ink is repelled by the moisture on the stone and clings to the original grease pencil lines. The stone is then placed in a press and used as a printing block to impart black on white images to paper.
In 1833, now twenty-years old and an accomplished lithographer, Nat Currier left Boston and moved to Philadelphia to do contract work for M.E.D. Brown, a noted engraver and printer. With the promise of good money, Currier hired on to help Brown prepare lithographic stones of scientific images for the American Journal of Sciences and Arts. When Nat completed the contract work in 1834, he traveled to New York City to work once again for his mentor John Pendleton, who was now operating his own shop located at 137 Broadway. Soon after the reunion, Pendleton expressed an interest in returning to Boston and offered to sell his print shop to Currier. Young Nat did not have the financial resources to buy the shop, but being the resourceful type he found another local printer by the name of Stodart. Together they bought Pendleton’s business.
The firm ‘Currier & Stodart’ specialized in "job" printing. They produced many different types of printed items, most notably music manuscripts for local publishers. By 1835, Stodart was frustrated that the business was not making enough money and he ended the partnership, taking his investment with him. With little more than some lithographic stones, and a talent for his trade, twenty-two year old Nat Currier set up shop in a temporary office at 1 Wall Street in New York City. He named his new enterprise ‘N. Currier, Lithographer’
Nathaniel continued as a job printer and duplicated everything from music sheets to architectural plans. He experimented with portraits, disaster scenes and memorial prints, and any thing that he could sell to the public from tables in front of his shop. During 1835 he produced a disaster print Ruins of the Planter's Hotel, New Orleans, which fell at two O’clock on the Morning of the 15th of May 1835, burying 50 persons, 40 of whom Escaped with their Lives. The public had a thirst for newsworthy events, and newspapers of the day did not include pictures. By producing this print, Nat gave the public a new way to “see” the news. The print sold reasonably well, an important fact that was not lost on Currier.
Nat met and married Eliza Farnsworth in 1840. He also produced a print that same year titled Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat Lexington in Long Island Sound on Monday Evening, January 18, 1840, by which melancholy occurrence over One Hundred Persons Perished. This print sold out very quickly, and Currier was approached by an enterprising publication who contracted him to print a single sheet addition of their paper, the New York Sun. This single page paper is presumed to be the first illustrated newspaper ever published.
The success of the Lexington print launched his career nationally and put him in a position to finally lift his family up. In 1841, Nat and Eliza had their first child, a son they named Edward West Currier. That same year Nat hired his twenty-one year old brother Charles and taught him the lithography trade, he also hired his artistically inclined brother Lorenzo to travel out west and make sketches of the new frontier as material for future prints. Charles worked for the firm on and off over the years, and invented a new type of lithographic crayon which he patented and named the Crayola. Lorenzo continued selling sketches to Nat for the next few years.
In 1843, Nat and Eliza had a daughter, Eliza West Currier, but tragedy struck in early 1847 when their young daughter died from a prolonged illness. Nat and Eliza were grief stricken, and Eliza, driven by despair, gave up on life and passed away just four months after her daughter’s death.
The subject of Nat Currier’s artwork changed following the death of his wife and daughter, and he produced many memorial prints and sentimental prints during the late 1840s. The memorial prints generally depicted grief stricken families posed by gravestones (the stones were left blank so the purchasers could fill in the names of the dearly departed). The sentimental prints usually depicted idealized portraits of women and children, titled with popular Christian names of the day.
Late in 1847, Nat Currier married Lura Ormsbee, a friend of the family. Lura was a self-sufficient woman, and she immediately set out to help Nat raise six-year-old Edward and get their house in order. In 1849, Lura delivered a son, Walter Black Currier, but fate dealt them a blow when young Walter died one year later. While Nat and Lura were grieving the loss of their new son, word came from San Francisco that Nat’s brother Lorenzo had also passed away from a brief illness. Nat sank deeper into his natural quiet melancholy. Friends stopped by to console the couple, and Lura began to set an extra place at their table for these unexpected guests. She continued this tradition throughout their lives.
In 1852, Charles introduced a friend, James Merritt Ives, to Nat and suggested he hire him as a bookkeeper. Jim Ives was a native New Yorker born in 1824 and raised on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital where his father was employed as superintendent. Jim was a self-trained artist and professional bookkeeper. He was also a plump and jovial man, presenting the exact opposite image of his new boss.
Jim Ives met Charles Currier through Caroline Clark, the object of Jim’s affection. Caroline’s sister Elizabeth was married to Charles, and Caroline was a close friend of the Currier family. Jim eventually proposed marriage to Caroline and solicited an introduction to Nat Currier, through Charles, in hopes of securing a more stable income to support his future wife.
Ives quickly set out to improve and modernize his new employer’s bookkeeping methods. He reorganized the firm’s sizable inventory, and used his artistic skills to streamline the firm’s production methods. By 1857, Nathaniel had become so dependent on Jims’ skills and initiative that he offered him a full partnership in the firm and appointed him general manager. The two men chose the name ‘Currier & Ives’ for the new partnership, and became close friends.
Currier & Ives produced their prints in a building at 33 Spruce Street where they occupied the third, fourth and fifth floors. The third floor was devoted to the hand operated printing presses that were built by Nat's cousin, Cyrus Currier, at his shop Cyrus Currier & Sons in Newark, NJ. The fourth floor found the artists, lithographers and the stone grinders at work. The fifth floor housed the coloring department, and was one of the earliest production lines in the country. The colorists were generally immigrant girls, mostly German, who came to America with some formal artistic training. Each colorist was responsible for adding a single color to a print. As a colorist finished applying their color, the print was passed down the line to the next colorist to add their color. The colorists worked from a master print displayed above their table, which showed where the proper colors were to be placed. At the end of the table was a touch up artist who checked the prints for quality, touching-in areas that may have been missed as it passed down the line. During the Civil War, demand for prints became so great that coloring stencils were developed to speed up production.
Although most Currier & Ives prints were colored in house, some were sent out to contract artists. The rate Currier & Ives paid these artists for coloring work was one dollar per one hundred small folios (a penny a print) and one dollar per one dozen large folios. Currier & Ives also offered uncolored prints to dealers, with instructions (included on the price list) on how to 'prepare the prints for coloring.' In addition, schools could order uncolored prints from the firm’s catalogue to use in their painting classes.
Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives attracted a wide circle of friends during their years in business. Some of their more famous acquaintances included Horace Greeley, Phineas T. Barnum, and the outspoken abolitionists Rev. Henry Ward, and John Greenleaf Whittier (the latter being a cousin of Mr. Currier).
Nat Currier and Jim Ives described their business as "Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures" and produced many categories of prints. These included Disaster Scenes, Sentimental Images, Sports, Humor, Hunting Scenes, Politics, Religion, City and Rural Scenes, Trains, Ships, Fire Fighters, Famous Race Horses, Historical Portraits, and just about any other topic that satisfied the general public's taste. In all, the firm produced in excess of 7500 different titles, totaling over one million prints produced from 1835 to 1907.
Nat Currier retired in 1880, and signed over his share of the firm to his son Edward. Nat died eight years later at his summer home 'Lion’s Gate' in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Jim Ives remained active in the firm until his death in 1895, when his share of the firm passed to his eldest son, Chauncey.
In 1902, faced will failing health from the ravages of Tuberculosis, Edward Currier sold his share of the firm to Chauncey Ives...
Category
Mid-19th Century Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Lithograph
Reflection
By Harold Altman
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Harold Altman was born in New York City in 1924. He attended the Art Students League, the Black Mountain College, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and was a graduate of ...
Category
Late 20th Century Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Walking Couple
By Harold Altman
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Harold Altman was born in New York City in 1924. He attended the Art Students League, the Black Mountain College, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and was a graduate of ...
Category
Late 20th Century Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
20th century lithograph black and white landscape print trees lake signed
By Adolf Dehn
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Peaceful Cove - New England" is an original lithograph by Adolf Dehn. The artist signed the piece lower right. It depicts an aerial view of New England.
9 1/2" x 13" image
11" x 15" paper
17" x 20 5/8" frame
Adolf Dehn was born in Minnesota, November 22, 1895 and he died in New York City, May 19 1968.
He was one of the most notable lithographers of the 20th century. Throughout his artistic career, Dehn participated in and helped define some important movements in American art, including Regionalism, Social Realism, and caricature. He was known for both his technical skills and his high-spirited, droll depictions of human foibles.
Biography
Dehn was born in 1895 in Waterville, Minnesota. Dehn began creating artwork at the age of six and by the time of his death had created nearly 650 images.
After high school he went to the Minneapolis School of Art, known today as the (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) where he met Wanda Gág...
Category
1940s Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
17th century etching black and white figurative landscape obelisk buildings
By Jan Frans van Bloemen (Orizzonte)
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Figures at the Obelisk" is an original etching by Jan Frans van Bloemen. It depicts two people conversing in front of a monument. Behind them, an expansive landscape sprawls.
9 1/4" x 6 3/4" art
21 3/4" x 19 3/8" frame
Jan Frans van Bloemen (baptized 12 May 1662 - buried 13 June 1749) was a Flemish landscape painter mainly active in Rome. Here he was able to establish himself as the leading painter of views (vedute) of the Roman countryside depicted in the aesthetic of the classical landscape tradition.
Van Bloemen predominantly painted classical landscapes, taking his inspiration from the Roman Campagna. His landscapes, with their recession through a series of planes, soft, warm lightning and classical and religious subject matter, drew on the examples of artists such as Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. His paintings are exquisitely imbued with that "difficult-to-define pastoral ambience" which helped to make him such a great painter in the eyes of his contemporaries. The technique and subjects of the work of Jan Frans van Bloemen are also related to painters such as Jan Asselijn, Thomas Wyck...
Category
18th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"Zarathustra, " Abstract Volcano Woodcut signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Zarathustra" is an original color woodcut by Carol Summers. The artist signed the piece in the image. This woodcut depicts an erupting volcano in simplified color fields. The editio...
Category
Early 2000s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Woodcut
"Les Patineurs, " Etching of a Winter Landscape signed by James Ensor
By James Ensor
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Les Patineurs" is a signed etching by James Ensor. It is from the Loÿs Delteil 65 volume XIX and depicts a multitude of skaters on a frozen pond. "Les Patineurs" is the French word ...
Category
Late 19th Century Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"Diocletian's Retreat, " Woodcut and Monotype signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Diocletian's Retreat" is a woodcut and monotype signed by Carol Summers. The image combines landscape and architecture, in this case a classical struc...
Category
1990s Contemporary Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Monotype, Woodcut
17th century etching black and white landscape forest trees figures scene
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"La Danse Sous Les Arbes (The Country Dance)" is an etching by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). This etching is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre. Publisher: Ma...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
19th century black and white etching industrial landscape boat riverbank trees
By Charles François Daubigny
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Le Bateau a Conflans/Le Paysagiste au Bateau" or "The Boat at Conflans/Landscape with Boat" is an original etching by Charles Francois Daubigny...
Category
Late 19th Century Barbizon School Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century etching black and white landscape scene forest trees figures sky
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Le Temps, Apollon, et les Saisons (Time, Apollo, and the Seasons)" is an etching by Claude Gellée (Le Lorrain). This etching is the Fifth state (A). This state is also in collections in Paris (BN, L, PP) and Washington; Mannocci cat. no. 43. The inscription reads: "Apollo in atto di obedire al tempo. La Primavera a cominciare il ballo. Lestate no manca del suo calore. L'aurunno colsuo licore / Seguita. Linvernno tiene la sua staggione, Claudio Gillee inven.Fec.Roma 1662 con licenza de super."
A powerful example of Claude's staging of landscape in the classical manner is the etching "Time,
Apollo, and the Seasons," done in 1662 after Poussin's painting of 1624-1636, "Dance to the Music of Time...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century etching black and white landscape scene forest trees figures sky
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"La Danse Sous Les Arbes (The Country Dance)" is an etching by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). This etching is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre. Publisher: Ma...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"La Fleche de Zenon (Zeno's Arrow), " Lithograph after Painting by Rene Magritte
By René Magritte
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"La Fleche de Zenon (Zeno's Arrow)" is a color lithograph after the original 1964 painting by Rene Magritte. A gigantic rock levitates over the sea. Waves crash bellow and a crescent moon hangs above.
Art: 9.75 x 11.75 in
Frame: 20.38 x 22.38 in
René-François-Ghislain Magritte was born November 21, 1898, in Lessines, Belgium and died on August 15, 1967 in Brussels. He is one of the most important surrealist artists. Through his art, Magritte creates humor and mystery with juxtapositions and shocking irregularities. Some of his hallmark motifs include the bourgeois “little man,” bowler hats, apples, hidden faces, and contradictory texts.
René Magritte’s father was a tailor and his mother was a miller. Tragedy struck Magritte’s life when his mother committed suicide when he was only fourteen. Magritte and his two brothers were thereafter raised by their grandmother.
Magritte studied at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1918. After graduating he worked as a wallpaper designer and in advertisement. It was during this period that he married Georgette Berger, whom he had known since they were teenagers.
In 1926, René Magritte signed...
Category
2010s Surrealist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
19th century etching black and white seascape print figure waves rocks signed
By James Fagan
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"The Fisherman's Catch" is a signed (in pencil lower right and in plate lower left) etching by James Fagan. It depicts a fisherman walking on a beach in black and white. It is signed...
Category
1880s American Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"Trees, " Landscape Wood Engraving by Betsy Ritz Friebert
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Trees" is an original wood engraving print by Betsy Ritz Friebert. It features a man walking down a large path underneath tall barren trees. Unsig...
Category
1930s American Modern Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Woodcut
"Daphnis et Chloe - The Lovers, " an Original Lithograph by Pierre Bonnard
By Pierre Bonnard
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Daphnis et Chloe - The Lovers" is an original lithograph by Pierre Bonnard. This lithograph is a rare proof for the illustrated edition of Daphnis et Chloe. There were two proofs, o...
Category
Early 1900s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
'Narcissus Braziliana' original woodcut & monotype signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present artwork is a vibrant and colorful example of the woodcut prints of Carol Summers. The image is dominated by the form of a red tropical flower, closely cropped around the petals like in the photographs of Imogen Cunningham and the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form.
9.63 x 11.63 inches, artwork
21 x 23 inches, frame
Edition 16/50 in pencil, lower right
Titled in pencil, lower right
Signed in pencil, lower center
Framed to conservation standards using archival materials including 100 percent rag matting, Museum Glass to inhibit fading, and housed in a modern profile gold gilded wood moulding.
Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade.
After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957.
Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape.
In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge.
Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal.
By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MoMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia.
Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape.
In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country.
In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and non-western as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image.
The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist.
At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Monotype, Woodcut
19th century color lithograph watercolor landscape figurative animal print
By Nathaniel Currier
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present hand-colored lithograph presents the viewer with a hunting scene in a picturesque landscape. In the foreground, a man approaches two partridges as his two pointers prepare to flush them out. Beyond, a white fence draws our eyes to the homestead in the distance. Images like this one show how people in the United States were trying to identify themselves as a new nation in the North American landscape - as separate from their European counterparts but with similar similar and specific wildlife and magesties of nature. It also identifies hunting in this landscape as an American pastime.
9.25 x 12.5 inches, artwork
18.38 x 22 inches, frame
Entitled bottom center "Partridge Shooting...
Category
Mid-19th Century Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Lithograph
'Distribution of Goods to the Gros Ventres' lithograph by John Mix Stanley
By John Mix Stanley
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States government set out to survey and document its newly acquired lands and territories west of the Mississippi. The goals of these surveys were manifold: to produce topographical maps, to document flora and fauna, and to document natural resources to build the emerging US economy. These surveys, and the images from them, also functioned to build the new sense of American identity with the landscape, condensing vistas into the 'picturesque' tradition of European image making. Thus, the entire span of US territory could be seen as a single, cohesive whole.
This lithograph comes from one of six surveys commissioned by the Army's Topographic Bureau in 1853, which sought to find the best route to construct a transcontinental railroad. The result was a thirteen-volume report including maps, lithographs, and technical data entitled 'Explorations and Surveys to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a Railroad from the Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean.' In particular, the print comes from the northern survey, commanded by Isaac Stevens, which explored the regions between the 47th and 49th parallels.
In this image, Stanley documented the encounter with the Gros Ventre people at Milk River. The explorers were invited to the Gros Ventres camp and the two groups exchanged gifts in friendship. The Stevens Party provided "... blankets, shirts, calico, knives, beads, paint, powder, shot, tobacco, hard bread, etc." The image likewise alludes to how, in 1855, Isaac Stevens, concluded a treaty (Stat., L., XI, 657) to provide peace between the United States and the Blackfoot, Flathead and Nez Perce tribes. The Gros Ventres signed the treaty as part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, whose territory near the Three Fork area became a common hunting ground for the Flathead, Nez Perce, Kootenai, and Crow Indians.
5.75 x 8.75 inches, image
6.5 x 9.25 inches, stone
17 x 20 inches, frame
Artist 'Stanley Del.' lower left
Entitled 'Distribution of Goods to the Gros Ventres' lower center margin
Publisher 'Sarony, Major & Knapp. Lith.s 449 Broadway N.Y.' lower right
Inscribed 'U.S.P.R.R. EXP. & SURVEYS — 47th & 49th PARALLELS' upper left
Inscribed 'GENERAL REPORT — PLATE XXI' upper right
Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting with French accents; glazed with UV5 Plexiglas to inhibit fading; housed in a gold reverse ogee moulding.
Print in overall good condition; some localized foxing and discoloration; minor surface abrasions to frame.
John Mix...
Category
1850s Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
17th century etching black and white landscape scene forest sheep figures sky
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing in a Landscape (Berger et Bergere Conversant)" is an etching by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). This etching is in the collections of the Metropolita...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
Landing Beaches of Normandy, French National Railroads
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Albert Victor Eugene Brenet was born June 25, 1903 in Harfleur, France, near Le Havre. He died at the age of 102 on July 4, 2005 in Paris. He painted primarily in gouache. Brenet is ...
Category
1940s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"Door County, Wisconsin, " Landscape Silkscreen Travel Poster
By Schomer Lichtner
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Door County Wisconsin" is an original silkscreen by Schomer Lichtner. The artist signed the piece lower right in pencil and in the screen. This piece feat...
Category
1980s Contemporary Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Screen, Ink
"Old Barns, " realist landscape ink print rural scene signed
By Stephen Parrish
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Old Barns" is an original etching signed by the artist Stephen Parrish. This etching depicts two barns in a rocky forest-edge landscape. The scene suggests nature's gentle and slow ...
Category
1880s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century etching black and white landscape forest trees figures scene
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Le Patre et la Bergere (The Herdsman & Shepherdess)" is an etching by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). This etching is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museu...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century etching black and white landscape harbor ruins figures scene
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Harbour Scene" is an engraving by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). The artist signed the piece in plate lower left.
7 3/4" x 9 5/8" art
18 1/8" x 20 1/4" frame
Biography
Claude Lorra...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Engraving
17th century etching black and white landscape scene forest trees figures sky
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"La Fuite en Egypte (The Flight into Egypt)" is an original etching by Claude Lorrain (Claude Gelee). This piece depicts the biblical story of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus goin...
Category
1630s Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century etching black and white landscape scene forest trees figures
By Claude Lorrain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Scene de Brigands" is an etching by Claude Gellee (Le Lorrain). This etching is in the collections of the Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago. Publisher: Mannocci #11.
5" x 7...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
Late 19th century color lithograph art nouveau ornate bookplate foliage
By Alphonse Mucha
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Ilsee's Palace" and "The Princess's Creation" are two sides of one double-sided original lithograph by Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. These illustrations were pages 67 & 68 of "...
Category
1890s Art Nouveau Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"La Bataille de l'Argonne (The Battle of Argonne), " Litho after Rene Magritte
By René Magritte
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"La Bataille de l'Argonne (The Battle of Argonne)" is a color lithograph after the original 1959 painting by Rene Magritte. The landscape is shrouded by ...
Category
2010s Surrealist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"Westminster Abbey, " complete portfolio of 13 etchings by John Sloan
By John Sloan
Located in Milwaukee, WI
John Sloan's Westminster Abbey portfolio is among the most rare of his printmaking output, and a complete set like this is even more unusual. Etched in dark brown ink in on a sturdy ...
Category
1890s Ashcan School Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching, Paper
'La Côte Basque' original lithograph travel poster with beach and golf
By Bernard Villemot
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This poster, titled 'La Côte Basque' in the image, was intended to draw people to travel to the Basque coast of Spain. The image is dominated by the serene blues, greens and yellows of the golf course and sandy beach. Throughout the vista, figures can be seen at leisure golfing, riding horseback, eating at restaurants, and sunbathing.
34 x 23.75 inches, poster
43.5 x 33.25 inches, image
Signed in the stone, lower right
Framed to conservation standards using archival materials including 100 percent rag mounting, UV5 Plexiglas to inhibit fading, and housed in a gold finished wood moulding with a 3-inch Belgian linen liner.
Bernard Villemot (1911 – 1989) was a French graphic artist known primarily for his iconic advertising images for Orangina, Bally Shoe, Perrier, and Air France. He was known for a sharp artistic vision that was influenced by photography, and for his ability to distill an advertising message to a memorable image with simple, elegant lines and bold colors. From 1932 to1934, he studied in Paris with artist Paul Colin, who was considered a master of Art Deco. From 1945 to 1946, Villemot prepared posters for the Red Cross. In the late 1940s, he also began a famous series of travel posters for Air France that would continue for decades. In 1949, Villemot's works were exhibited with those of his contemporary poster artist Raymond Savignac at the Gallery of Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1953, Villemot began designing logos and posters for the new soft drink Orangina, and over time these works would become some of his best known. In 1963, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris held an exhibition of his works. By the end of his life in 1989, he was known as one of the last great poster artists, and many collectors and critics consider him to be the "painter-laureate of modern commercial art." Since his death in 1989, his memorable images have been increasingly sought after by collectors. At least three books have been published that survey his art: "Les affiches de Villemot," by Jean-Francois Bazin...
Category
1960s Modern Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"French Air Show with Remarque of Head of Pilot, " Lithograph & Stencil by GAMY
By Marguerite Montaut
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"French Air Show with Remarque of Head of Pilot" is an original lithograph and stencil print by Marguerite Montaut (GAMY). It depicts an early airplane flying above a crowd of specta...
Category
1910s American Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Stencil, Ink
20th century etching figurative landscape city street black and white signed
By Edgar Chahine
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Venise" is an original etching and chine colle by Edgar Chahine. This is an artist's proof, the third state of the etching, and the artist signed the piece in pencil lower right. Th...
Category
1920s Modern Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
'Hyde Park' original woodcut engraving signed by Auguste Louis Lepère
By Auguste Louis Lepère
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present artwork is an excellent example of the woodcut engravings of Auguste-Louis Lepère (1849 - 1918). He was the son of the sculptor Francois Lepère, a...
Category
1860s Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Woodcut, Engraving
'Field' original abstract linocut in black by Wisconsin artist Schomer Lichtner
By Schomer Lichtner
Located in Milwaukee, WI
'Field' is an original linocut by Wisconsin-based artist Schomer Lichtner. The composition presents fields of flowers, trees and grasses below a cloudy sky, but rendered with Lichtner's quintessential abstract sensibilities. This print is one from a series that each depict abstracted subjects in black silhouette, taking pleasure in the materiality of the linocut technique. The free forms of the plants resemble the lyrical mid-century works of the French artist Henri Matisse, which combined with these material concerns demonstrate Lichter's modern sensibilities. The prints from this series are unusual because of how below the image, Lichtner also includes his Chinese seal and a linocut remarque of a cow, each of which act as an additional signature of the artist on the artwork.
Linocut in black and red on Permalife white wove paper
4.5 x 6 inches, image
11.5 x 8.75 inches, sheet
16.5 x 13.63 inches, frame
Signed in pencil, below image, lower right.
Edition 1/100 in pencil, below image, lower left.
Chinese signature stamp in red, below image, lower right.
Remaque of a cow in red, below image, lower right.
Permalife watermark to paper.
Framed to conservation standards in a shadow-box style mounting, using 100 percent rag matting, museum glass, and housed in a silver-finish wood moulding.
Overall excellent condition with no creases or discoloration.
Milwaukee artist Schomer Lichtner was well known for his whimsical cows and ballerinas and abstract imagery. He and his late wife Ruth Grotenrath, both well-known Wisconsin artists, began their prolific careers as muralists for WPA projects, primarily post offices.
Lichtner also painted murals for industry and private clients. Schomer was a printmaker and produced block prints, lithographs, and serigraph prints. His casein (paint made from dairy products) and acrylic paintings are of the rural Wisconsin landscape and farm animals. He became interested in cows when he and Ruth spent summers near Holy Hill in Washington County. According to David Gordon, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Schomer Lichtner had a tremendous joie de vivre and expressed it in his art.
Schomer Lichtner was nationally known for his whimsical paintings and sculptures of black- and white-patterned Holstein cows...
Category
Late 20th Century American Modern Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Black and White, Paper, Linocut
17th century etching black and white landscape forest trees satyr goats
By Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Mythological Scene--Satyr & Goat Herder" is an etching by Italian artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. It depicts a satyr lounging on the left and an approaching goat herder on th...
Category
Mid-17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
17th century engraving black and white landscape ancient building scene
By Israel Silvestre
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In the mid-seventeenth century, views of historic landscapes and classical structures were increasingly popular among print collectors, and artists like the Frenchman Israel Sylvestre were eager to fill that demand. In this example, Sylvestre captures a view of the Arch of Constantine...
Category
Mid-17th Century Baroque Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Engraving
17th century engraving black and white landscape ancient building scene
By Israel Silvestre
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Tempo di Minerva Medica" is an original engraving by Israel Silvestre, titled along the lower edge. This miniature print depicts the ruins of the Temple of Minerva Medica in the Rom...
Category
1650s Baroque Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Engraving
"Passage a Village, " Original Drypoint, Signed
By Hermine David
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Passage a Village" is an original drypoint print by Hermine David. It depicts a number of figures on a path into a village using various forms of transportation. This piece is edition 120/150.
11" x 9 3/4" art
21 5/8" x 17" frame
Hermine Lionette Cartan David (19 April 1886 in Paris-1 December 1970 in Bry-sur-Marne) was a French painter and the wife of Jules Pascin. She was also a great-granddaughter of the revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David.
Hermine David was one of the Ecole de Paris...
Category
1920s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Drypoint
'Victor's Camp - Hell Gate Ronde' original John Mix Stanley lithograph
By John Mix Stanley
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States government set out to survey and document its newly acquired lands and territories west of the Mississippi. The goals of these surveys were manifold: to produce topographical maps, to document flora and fauna, and to document natural resources to build the emerging US economy. These surveys, and the images from them, also functioned to build the new sense of American identity with the landscape, condensing vistas into the 'picturesque' tradition of European image making. Thus, the entire span of US territory could be seen as a single, cohesive whole.
This lithograph comes from one of six surveys commissioned by the Army's Topographic Bureau in 1853, which sought to find the best route to construct a transcontinental railroad. The result was a thirteen-volume report including maps, lithographs, and technical data entitled 'Explorations and Surveys to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a Railroad from the Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean.' In particular, the print comes from the northern survey, commanded by Isaac Stevens, which explored the regions between the 47th and 49th parallels.
Stanley shows here the stop the Stanley Party made at the junction of the Bitterroot and Hell Gate, in present day Montana. While there, the Party met with the Flathead Chief by the name Victor, as is shown in the image. The figures and their encampment are dwarfed by the vast landscape around them, indicating the sublimity of these new American territories.
5.75 x 8.75 inches, image
6.5 x 9.25 inches, stone
17 x 20 inches, frame
Artist 'Stanley Del.' lower left
Entitled 'Victor's Camp - Hell Gate Ronde' lower center margin
Publisher 'Sarony, Major & Knapp. Lith.s 449 Broadway N.Y.' lower right
Inscribed 'U.S.P.R.R. EXP. & SURVEYS — 47th & 49th PARALLELS' upper left
Inscribed 'GENERAL REPORT — PLATE XXXI' upper right
Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting with French accents; glazed with UV5 Plexiglas to inhibit fading; housed in a gold reverse ogee moulding.
Print in overall good condition; some localized foxing and discoloration; minor surface abrasions to frame.
John Mix Stanley...
Category
1850s Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Panoramic View of Milwaukee Taken From City Hall Tower
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The Gugler Lithograph Co.
Chromolithograph 37 x 120 cm. (image with accompanying text)
Category
Late 19th Century Naturalistic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
'In Memory of (66)' original Kellogg & Comstock hand-colored mourning lithograph
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present hand-colored lithograph was produced as part of the funeral and mourning culture in the United States during the 19th century. Before the printmaking boom of the 1830s, however, such inexpensive memorial images were not widely available. These prints became popular as ways of remembering loved ones, an alternative to portraiture of the deceased or to meticulous hand-embroidered memorials often made by female academy students. In the image, the urn-topped monument contains a space where a family could inscribe the name and death dates of a deceased loved one, though this example was never used. In the variations of this image type produced by the Kellogg...
Category
Mid-19th Century Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Watercolor
19th century black and white etching landscape scene boat riverbank trees signed
By Thomas R. Manley
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Farm at Inlet" is an etching by Thomas R. Manley signed lower right. It depicts a waterfront scene in black and gray.
26 1/2" x 33 1/2" art
26 3/8" x 33 3/8" framed
Thomas Manley...
Category
1880s American Impressionist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"Combloux (Golfing), " Original Lithograph Poster signed by Pierre Commarmond
By Pierre Commarmond
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Combloux (Golfing)" is an original lithograph poster by Pierre Commarmond. Combloux is a resort in France where people can surround themselves with nature, leisure, and sport. The artist signed the lithograph stone...
Category
1920s Other Art Style Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"Traveling on the Liverpool & Manchester Railroad, 1831, " Raphael Tuck & Son
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Traveling on the Liverpool & Manchester Railroad, 1831" is a color lithograph by Raphael Tuck & Sons. It depicts two trains carrying various cargo.
8" x 24 1/2" art
17 1/2" x 33 3...
Category
1890s Other Art Style Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
17th century etching black and white figurative landscape trees buildings
By Jan Frans van Bloemen (Orizzonte)
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Conversation Outside Castle" is an original etching by Jan Frans van Bloemen. It depicts a number of figures just outside the majestic walls of a castle. These groups of figures are engaged in their own conversations.
9" x 6 3/4" art
21 5/8" x 19 3/8" frame
Jan Frans van Bloemen (baptized 12 May 1662 - buried 13 June 1749) was a Flemish landscape painter mainly active in Rome. Here he was able to establish himself as the leading painter of views (vedute) of the Roman countryside depicted in the aesthetic of the classical landscape tradition.
Van Bloemen predominantly painted classical landscapes, taking his inspiration from the Roman Campagna. His landscapes, with their recession through a series of planes, soft, warm lightning and classical and religious subject matter, drew on the examples of artists such as Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. His paintings are exquisitely imbued with that "difficult-to-define pastoral ambience" which helped to make him such a great painter in the eyes of his contemporaries. The technique and subjects of the work of Jan Frans van Bloemen are also related to painters such as Jan Asselijn...
Category
18th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
"Circuit De L'Est" Original Aeronautical Lithograph Poster by Marguerite Montaut
By Marguerite Montaut
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Circuit De L'Est" is an original lithograph poster by Marguerite Montaut (GAMY). This artwork features an early biplane flying over farm fields. It is also passing over a river that...
Category
1910s Modern Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph, Ink
"Sketch Near Pittsfield, " realist landscape ink sketch rural scene signed
By Stephen Parrish
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Sketch Near Pittsfield" is an original etching signed by the artist Stephen Parrish. It depicts a small group of buildings next to a lake. A path runs next to them, and the entire s...
Category
1880s Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
19th century landscape etching farm field black and white figures pastoral scene
By Charles François Daubigny
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Charles Francois Daubigny's etching from around 1865 is an example of the Barbizon painters' preoccupations. Entitled "Les Vendages," the work depicts peasants bringing in the harves...
Category
Mid-19th Century Barbizon School Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Etching
19th century color lithograph portraits ship seascape patriotic flags military
By Nathaniel Currier
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present hand-colored lithograph is an excellent example of patriotic mid-nineteenth century American imagery. The print shows the battle and several of the major figures involved in the Battle of Lake Erie: At the center is a view of several frigates on the lake, embroiled in conflict. Above the battle is the quotation: "We have met the enemy and they are ours." Surrounding are laurel-lined roundels with portraits of Oliver Hazard Perry (1785-1819), Stephen Dicateur (1779-1820), Johnston Blakeley (1871-1814), William Bainbridge (1774-1833), David Porter (1780-1843), and James Lawrence (1781-1813) - all of these framed by American flags, banners and cannons. This print shows that the Battle of Lake Erie, part of the War of 1812, still held resonance for American audiences several decades later and was part of the larger narrative of the founding of the country.
9.5 x 13.5 inches, artwork
20 x 23.38 inches, frame
Entitled in the image
Signed in the stone, lower left "Lith. and Pub. by N. Currier"
Inscribed lower right "2 Spruce N.Y." and "No. 1"
Copyrighted lower center "Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1846 by N. Currier in the Clerk's office of the Southern District of N.Y."
Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting and housed in a gold gilded moulding.
Nathaniel Currier was a tall introspective man with a melancholy nature. He could captivate people with his piercing stare or charm them with his sparkling blue eyes. Nathaniel was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on March 27th, 1813, the second of four children. His parents, Nathaniel and Hannah Currier, were distant cousins who lived a humble yet spartan life. When Nathaniel was eight years old, tragedy struck. Nathaniel’s father unexpectedly passed away leaving Nathaniel and his eleven-year-old brother Lorenzo to provide for the family. In addition to their mother, Nathaniel and Lorenzo had to care for six-year-old sister Elizabeth and two-year-old brother Charles. Nathaniel worked a series of odd jobs to support the family, and at fifteen, he started what would become a life-long career when he apprenticed in the Boston lithography shop of William and John Pendleton.
A Bavarian gentleman named Alois Senefelder invented lithography just 30 years prior to young Nat Currier’s apprenticeship. While under the employ of the brothers Pendleton, Nat was taught the art of lithography by the firm’s chief printer, a French national named Dubois, who brought the lithography trade to America.
Lithography involves grinding a piece of limestone flat and smooth then drawing in mirror image on the stone with a special grease pencil. After the image is completed, the stone is etched with a solution of aqua fortis leaving the greased areas in slight relief. Water is then used to wet the stone and greased-ink is rolled onto the raised areas. Since grease and water do not mix, the greased-ink is repelled by the moisture on the stone and clings to the original grease pencil lines. The stone is then placed in a press and used as a printing block to impart black on white images to paper.
In 1833, now twenty-years old and an accomplished lithographer, Nat Currier left Boston and moved to Philadelphia to do contract work for M.E.D. Brown, a noted engraver and printer. With the promise of good money, Currier hired on to help Brown prepare lithographic stones of scientific images for the American Journal of Sciences and Arts. When Nat completed the contract work in 1834, he traveled to New York City to work once again for his mentor John Pendleton, who was now operating his own shop located at 137 Broadway. Soon after the reunion, Pendleton expressed an interest in returning to Boston and offered to sell his print shop to Currier. Young Nat did not have the financial resources to buy the shop, but being the resourceful type he found another local printer by the name of Stodart. Together they bought Pendleton’s business.
The firm ‘Currier & Stodart’ specialized in "job" printing. They produced many different types of printed items, most notably music manuscripts for local publishers. By 1835, Stodart was frustrated that the business was not making enough money and he ended the partnership, taking his investment with him. With little more than some lithographic stones, and a talent for his trade, twenty-two year old Nat Currier set up shop in a temporary office at 1 Wall Street in New York City. He named his new enterprise ‘N. Currier, Lithographer’
Nathaniel continued as a job printer and duplicated everything from music sheets to architectural plans. He experimented with portraits, disaster scenes and memorial prints, and any thing that he could sell to the public from tables in front of his shop. During 1835 he produced a disaster print Ruins of the Planter's Hotel, New Orleans, which fell at two O’clock on the Morning of the 15th of May 1835, burying 50 persons, 40 of whom Escaped with their Lives. The public had a thirst for newsworthy events, and newspapers of the day did not include pictures. By producing this print, Nat gave the public a new way to “see” the news. The print sold reasonably well, an important fact that was not lost on Currier.
Nat met and married Eliza Farnsworth in 1840. He also produced a print that same year titled Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat Lexington in Long Island Sound on Monday Evening, January 18, 1840, by which melancholy occurrence over One Hundred Persons Perished. This print sold out very quickly, and Currier was approached by an enterprising publication who contracted him to print a single sheet addition of their paper, the New York Sun. This single page paper is presumed to be the first illustrated newspaper ever published.
The success of the Lexington print launched his career nationally and put him in a position to finally lift his family up. In 1841, Nat and Eliza had their first child, a son they named Edward West Currier. That same year Nat hired his twenty-one year old brother Charles and taught him the lithography trade, he also hired his artistically inclined brother Lorenzo to travel out west and make sketches of the new frontier as material for future prints. Charles worked for the firm on and off over the years, and invented a new type of lithographic crayon which he patented and named the Crayola. Lorenzo continued selling sketches to Nat for the next few years.
In 1843, Nat and Eliza had a daughter, Eliza West Currier, but tragedy struck in early 1847 when their young daughter died from a prolonged illness. Nat and Eliza were grief stricken, and Eliza, driven by despair, gave up on life and passed away just four months after her daughter’s death.
The subject of Nat Currier’s artwork changed following the death of his wife and daughter, and he produced many memorial prints and sentimental prints during the late 1840s. The memorial prints generally depicted grief stricken families posed by gravestones (the stones were left blank so the purchasers could fill in the names of the dearly departed). The sentimental prints usually depicted idealized portraits of women and children, titled with popular Christian names of the day.
Late in 1847, Nat Currier married Lura Ormsbee, a friend of the family. Lura was a self-sufficient woman, and she immediately set out to help Nat raise six-year-old Edward and get their house in order. In 1849, Lura delivered a son, Walter Black Currier, but fate dealt them a blow when young Walter died one year later. While Nat and Lura were grieving the loss of their new son, word came from San Francisco that Nat’s brother Lorenzo had also passed away from a brief illness. Nat sank deeper into his natural quiet melancholy. Friends stopped by to console the couple, and Lura began to set an extra place at their table for these unexpected guests. She continued this tradition throughout their lives.
In 1852, Charles introduced a friend, James Merritt Ives, to Nat and suggested he hire him as a bookkeeper. Jim Ives was a native New Yorker born in 1824 and raised on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital where his father was employed as superintendent. Jim was a self-trained artist and professional bookkeeper. He was also a plump and jovial man, presenting the exact opposite image of his new boss.
Jim Ives met Charles Currier through Caroline Clark, the object of Jim’s affection. Caroline’s sister Elizabeth was married to Charles, and Caroline was a close friend of the Currier family. Jim eventually proposed marriage to Caroline and solicited an introduction to Nat Currier, through Charles, in hopes of securing a more stable income to support his future wife.
Ives quickly set out to improve and modernize his new employer’s bookkeeping methods. He reorganized the firm’s sizable inventory, and used his artistic skills to streamline the firm’s production methods. By 1857, Nathaniel had become so dependent on Jims’ skills and initiative that he offered him a full partnership in the firm and appointed him general manager. The two men chose the name ‘Currier & Ives’ for the new partnership, and became close friends.
Currier & Ives produced their prints in a building at 33 Spruce Street where they occupied the third, fourth and fifth floors. The third floor was devoted to the hand operated printing presses that were built by Nat's cousin, Cyrus Currier, at his shop Cyrus Currier & Sons in Newark, NJ. The fourth floor found the artists, lithographers and the stone grinders at work. The fifth floor housed the coloring department, and was one of the earliest production lines in the country. The colorists were generally immigrant girls, mostly German, who came to America with some formal artistic training. Each colorist was responsible for adding a single color to a print. As a colorist finished applying their color, the print was passed down the line to the next colorist to add their color. The colorists worked from a master print displayed above their table, which showed where the proper colors were to be placed. At the end of the table was a touch up artist who checked the prints for quality, touching-in areas that may have been missed as it passed down the line. During the Civil War, demand for prints became so great that coloring stencils were developed to speed up production.
Although most Currier & Ives prints were colored in house, some were sent out to contract artists. The rate Currier & Ives paid these artists for coloring work was one dollar per one hundred small folios (a penny a print) and one dollar per one dozen large folios. Currier & Ives also offered uncolored prints to dealers, with instructions (included on the price list) on how to 'prepare the prints for coloring.' In addition, schools could order uncolored prints from the firm’s catalogue to use in their painting classes.
Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives attracted a wide circle of friends during their years in business. Some of their more famous acquaintances included Horace Greeley, Phineas T. Barnum, and the outspoken abolitionists Rev. Henry Ward, and John Greenleaf Whittier (the latter being a cousin of Mr. Currier).
Nat Currier and Jim Ives described their business as "Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures" and produced many categories of prints. These included Disaster Scenes, Sentimental Images, Sports, Humor, Hunting Scenes, Politics, Religion, City and Rural Scenes, Trains, Ships, Fire Fighters, Famous Race Horses, Historical Portraits, and just about any other topic that satisfied the general public's taste. In all, the firm produced in excess of 7500 different titles, totaling over one million prints produced from 1835 to 1907.
Nat Currier retired in 1880, and signed over his share of the firm to his son Edward. Nat died eight years later at his summer home 'Lion’s Gate' in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Jim Ives remained active in the firm until his death in 1895, when his share of the firm passed to his eldest son, Chauncey.
In 1902, faced will failing health from the ravages of Tuberculosis, Edward Currier sold his share of the firm to Chauncey Ives...
Category
1850s Victorian Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Watercolor, Lithograph
'Kettle Falls, Columbia River' original color lithograph by John Mix Stanley
By John Mix Stanley
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States government set out to survey and document its newly acquired lands and territories west of the Mississippi. The goals of these surveys were manifold: to produce topographical maps, to document flora and fauna, and to document natural resources to build the emerging US economy. These surveys, and the images from them, also functioned to build the new sense of American identity with the landscape, condensing vistas into the 'picturesque' tradition of European image making. Thus, the entire span of US territory could be seen as a single, cohesive whole.
This lithograph comes from one of six surveys commissioned by the Army's Topographic Bureau in 1853, which sought to find the best route to construct a transcontinental railroad. The result was a thirteen-volume report including maps, lithographs, and technical data entitled 'Explorations and Surveys to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a Railroad from the Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean.'
When it came to depicting the Columbia River, as seen in the present print, Stanley chose to depict the river's characteristic rock formations and choppy waters. The figures in the image give the viewer a sense of the vase scale of the imposing landscape. Other explorers that reached the site years before the Pacific Railroad Survey, such as Lewis and Clark, observed this scene with wonder and awe – and it is clear Stanley felt the same way.
5.75 x 8.75 inches, image
6.5 x 9.25 inches, stone
13.25 x 16.25 inches, frame
Artist 'Stanley Del.' lower left
Entitled 'Kettle Falls, Columbia River' lower center margin
Publisher 'Sarony, Major & Knapp. Lith.s 449 Broadway N.Y.' lower right
Inscribed 'U.S.P.R.R. EXP. & SURVEYS — 47th & 49th PARALLELS' upper left
Inscribed 'GENERAL REPORT — PLATE XLVII' upper right
Framed to conservation standards using 100 percent rag matting and Museum Glass to inhibit fading; housed in a brass-surface aluminium moulding.
Print in overall good condition; wrinkles in upper margin and upper right corner; frame in excellent condition.
John Mix Stanley...
Category
1850s Romantic Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
"Royalty Greeting Townspeople, " a Tempera Diptych from the Late 19th c.
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Royalty Greeting Townspeople" is a Persian tempera diptych from the Late 19th century. It includes multiple figures in red and blue interacting in a f...
Category
Late 19th Century Other Art Style Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Tempera
"Pine Tree, " Offset Black & White Lithograph by Ruth Grotenrath
By Ruth Grotenrath
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Pine Tree" is an offset lithograph by Ruth Grotenrath, created for the Riveredge Nature Center, Inc. for their Artists for Conservation series. It depicts an elaborate drawing of a pine tree with branches growing in multiple directions and overlapping one another.
5" x 6 5/8" art
13 5/8" x 15 1/4" frame
"The paintings of Ruth...
Category
1960s Expressionist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Photography Black White Landscape Outdoor Nature Adventure Travel Photo Signed
By Thomas Ferderbar
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Yosemite Valley" is an original photograph by Thomas Ferderbar. This is an expansive landscape show of the yosemite valley. An amazing black and white view that emulates Ferderbar's...
Category
1950s Contemporary Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Luster, Archival Ink, Digital
18th century landscape etching pastoral house nature scene detailed ink trees
By John Thomas Smith
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Figure by the Cottage in Forest" is an original etching by John Thomas Smith. The miniature landscape shows a pair of cottages in the woods, nestled back into the trees. A river flo...
Category
1790s Old Masters Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Paper, Ink, Etching
"Venise en Fleurs" from "Je Reve, " Surrealist Lithograph signed by Andre Masson
By André Masson
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Venise en Fleurs" is an original color lithograph by Andre Masson. This piece is from the "Je Reve" (I Dream) portfolio of 1975. The edition number, written lower left, is H.C. XXV/...
Category
1970s Surrealist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Lithograph
Black and White Etching Travel 1930's Realism Water Industrial Outdoors Signed
By Joseph Margulies
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Fishing Boats Gloucester" is a soft ground etching created by Joseph Margulies. The artist signed this piece in the lower right margin with graphite. This piece depicts several fish...
Category
1930s American Realist Wisconsin - Landscape Prints
Materials
Ink, Etching, Aquatint