Nineteenth Century American Color Plate Books - Review

Magazine Antiques, August, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

Today, when black and white is considered boring and color is everywhere, it is difficult to remember a relatively recent past when color illustrations were rare and expensive. The nineteenth century was the great time of experimentation with diverse methods of producing colorplates both in Europe and the United States. The present book is a catalogue of the nineteenth- century American colorplate books exhibited at the Grolier Club in New York City earlier this year. It is also an intriguing chronological survey of the century, from hand-colored copperplate engraving to trichromatic halftone and the many variations in between.

Copperplate engraving was favored as the basis for handcolored plates until about 1830, although in the 1820s there was a brief vogue for hand-colored aquatints. The 1830s and 1840s were the heyday of the hand-colored lithograph. This was superseded by the chromolithograph in which a different stone was used for each color. Finally, the trichromatic halftone was developed in the 1890s. In this process a plate for each of three colors is printed over the halftone plate - a method that prevailed until very recently. In all cases changes were driven by no loftier motives than the attempt to save money.

The author does not offer detailed technical explanations of the processes involved. Rather, his subject is the printing history and the people involved in producing the 114 books in the exhibition. As might be expected, most of the people were transplanted Europeans who brought their skills with them. The first was the Englishman William Birch who in 1800, six years after coming to the United States, issued The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania... with the hope that it would be a vehicle "by which the improvements of the country could be conveyed to Europe," thus sounding a note of patriotism that was frequently repeated by these new Americans. When George Catlin published his North American Indian Portfolio in London in 1844 it was shamelessly pirated the next year by the New York lithographer James Ackerman. In his jingoistic introduction Ackerman contests "the received opinion that nothing pictorial can be executed in this country equal to the European productions, and would leave his countrymen to carry out the experiment, whether it be not that patronage is alone wanting to produce originals - or republications equal if not superior to those of all Europe." Then, in 1865, Ackerman's stones reappeared in the hands of Currier and Ives, who changed captions and credits and then issued each plate separately for fifty cents apiece. So much for copyrights.

The greatest single commercial success in the annals of nineteenth-century American colorplate book publishing was almost certainly the seven-volume octavo edition of The Birds of America by John James Audubon. With five hundred hand-colored plates it was not overpriced at one hundred dollars, and it went through many editions. Audubon and his two sons, John Woodhouse and Victor, were hustlers, traveling the country to gather subscriptions for the project. Unfortunately, after John James died and Victor was dying, the surviving son John decided in 1858 to produce a chromolithographed version of the London-made double-elephant folio. Subscriptions shrank with the advent of the Civil War, and the project collapsed, consuming the family savings. Still, as the author writes, "no other artists or publishers approached the enterprises of the Audubons in the size and extent of the projects they undertook."

Colorplates were invaluable to medical publishing and included such ingenious applications as plates with "up to five levels of hinged flaps, showing details of progressive stages of gestation or medical procedures during birth" for George Spratt's Obstetric Tables (Philadelphia, 1850). Gift books also made use of hinged flaps, albeit more frivolously. In The American Toilet (New York, c. 1827) illustrations of cosmetic containers have hinged flaps. Thus lifting the flap labeled "A Wash to Smooth Away Wrinkles" reveals the word laughter, and so forth in the same vein. Rochester, New York, developed a thriving colorplate industry, making catalogues to advertise the products of local seedsmen, of whom there were a great many. And the vendors of women's fashions seized on colorplates with a vengeance.

This book is an excellent written introduction to the variety and development of the color illustration in the United States in the last century. Unfortunately, it is far from fully illustrated - probably for reasons of economy. And sometimes an illustration will appear far from its write-up with no cross-reference in either place to lead the reader to it. An example is the notice on page 107 about a book dealing with the ceramics collection of W. T. Walters, illustrated with 116 chromolithographs by the great lithographer Louis Prang. Each plate required from twenty to forty-four stones, and the "introduction to the set immodestly but accurately states that the plates 'represent the highest type of work that has been produced in that branch of art.'" In this case, he who seeks shall find. A full-page illustration from the book appears in the introduction on page 28.