19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the days before widespread circulation of cheap photographs and picture postcards, topographical views were the established means of communicating the appearance of the world to a curious, increasingly educated public. A print publisher's staple, they provided employment to many a landscape artist. Henry Rittner's original backer, Jean Frederic d'Ostervald (1773-1850), a Swiss, was a prominent publisher of the genre in Paris in the 1820s. Gathered around him, among others, were Sigismond Himely and Friedrich Salathe, (17) aquatint engravers whose names would crop up thirty years later on Goupil American views.

It is unclear whether Schaus first met Kollner in Paris, where Kollner worked before immigrating to the United States in 1839, or in New York after Schaus's arrival in 1847. According to John Reps, Kollner was in business in Philadelphia by late 1840, publishing his first city view, a lithograph of Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, in 1842. (18) In 1847 he produced illustrations for the American Sunday-School Union in Philadelphia. (19) That same year, 1847, appears in the title of a view he made of New York's Wall Street, (20) an image identical to the one that Goupil and Company published in 1850 as Number 47 in the Kollner series (Pl. IV). The lithographer of these identical prints, indeed, of the entire Kollner series, was Isidore Laurent Deroy, (21) a veteran of an earlier American landscape series, Jacques Gerard Milbert's Itineraire pittoresque du fleuve Hudson, published in Paris in 1828 and 1829.

Of the total series of fifty-four, no fewer than thirty-six Kollner views bear the date 1848. This is an implausible quantity for Kollner and Deroy to have executed in the eight months between Goupil's opening in February 1848 and the announcement of the publication that October. Combined with the date on the Wall Street view, it suggests that instead of commissioning the Kollner plates, Schaus acquired most of them ready-made, whereupon he dispatched them to Paris to be printed by Cattier with Goupil's special decorative border and issued jointly in New York and Paris by Goupil, and in London by Goupil's frequent collaborator, Ernest Gambart. (22) This would explain the series starting with six views of Baltimore (see Pl. VI), a rapidly growing seaport but no match for New York in terms of consumer interest. Only the final fascicle in the series--the six Canadian views--is "entered," that is, copyrighted, by Schaus and printed by Jacomme et Compagnie. All the rest are copyrighted by Kollner and printed by Cattier: This, too, suggests that the first eight fascicles, or forty-eight plates, preceded Kollner's publication agreement with Goupil, Vibert and Company. Schaus's achievement was, therefore, to identify the marketability of Kollner's work and introduce it into the Goupil system, where it would be fed quickly into the established, international printsellers' network. Such astuteness and efficiency help to explain Goupil's success in the American market.