American genre prints in the service of French commerce 1848-1860

When, in February 1848, Goupil, Vibert and Company of Paris opened a branch in New York City, American artists suddenly found themselves before the Pearly Gates, for this modest storefront on lower Broadway represented the first permanent American portal to the busy European trade in reproductive prints.

Goupil's resourceful German-born manager, William Schaus, arrived in New York in 1847 with two directives: to identify American works that, when transformed into French engravings or lithographs, would attract buyers on both sides of the Atlantic; and to set up a nationwide marketing campaign in the United States.

William Sidney Mount was the first American artist to catch Schaus's eye, but ultimately Schaus and his successor, Michael Knoedler (1823-1878), initiated publication by Goupil of some fifty American genre subjects, the majority as lithographs, before the outbreak of the Civil War. Prints after Mount, George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), and Richard Caton Woodville (1825-1855) were the best of this production. But Schaus and Knoedler also recruited such lesser lights as Felix Octavius Carr Darley, Lilly Martin Spencer, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Theodore Marsden, Edward Harrison May, and Samuel Stillman Osgood. These "national publications," as Goupil advertised the genre subjects, supported a strategy of prying the American market open to Goupil's many reproductions by means of repeated appeals to the young nation's earnest determination to foster a genuinely American school of painters.

Conveniently, in the spring of 1847, as Schaus was taking his first soundings of the New York art world, Mount's The Force of Music (later renamed The Power of Music; Cleveland Museum of Art) was generating a sympathetic outpouring from visitors to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York City. As soon as he saw it, Schaus wrote Goupil that this painting was "equal to any genre picture he ever saw in Paris or elsewhere." (1) Once permanently settled in New York, he borrowed the canvas from its owner, Mrs. Gideon Lee, and shipped it to Paris for reproduction as a lithograph. As Schaus later wrote, "This was the first recognition of American Art by Europe, for Mount's picture was the first one ever sent to Paris to be engraved [sic]." (2) When delivered a proof of The Power of Music, Mount pronounced it "better than I expected." (3) Drawn on stone by Alphonse Leon Noel, a frequent recipient of Goupil commissions, this "very superior style of lithograph" was published on December 10, 1848 (Fig. 4), and marketed at three dollars plain, five dollars for a proof before letters (of which one hundred impressions were made), and five dollars for an impression "colored in superior style." (4) Lithography was quicker and much less expensive than engraving, and Goupil's decision to reproduce The Power of Music as a lithograph signaled a resolve to compete headlong with American popular lithography like that flowing from the presses of Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888).

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Since Mount originally conceived The Power of Music as a companion to his earlier Dance of the Haymakers of 1845 (Long Island Museum of American Art, Stony Brook, New York), (5) it followed that Schaus would dispatch the latter to be lithographed by Noel and published--as Music Is Contagious--in a format identical to that of The Power of Music. The success of the companion pieces prompted publication the next spring of a third Noel lithograph of a Mount work, Catching Rabbits, after Boys Trapping of 1839 (Long Island Museum).

If Schaus needed help adapting to New York's small art world, there were French connections and friendly Americans in the city willing to guide him. Frenchmen like Comte Regis de Trobriand (1816-1897) and the miniature painter Savinien Edme Dubourjal (1795-1853) had already established themselves and were eager for Goupil commissions. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) and George Pope Morris (1802-1864), editors of the Home Journal, became enthusiastic supporters. In one way or another, Schaus learned of the American Art-Union and adopted its structure and rhetoric as the template for Goupil's marketing effort. Never mind the outright plagiarism involved--the law overlooked plagiarism--in December 1848, just as The Power of Music was making its appearance as a lithograph, Schaus launched Goupil, Vibert and Company's International Art-Union, a clone of the American Art-Union. Goupil's Art-Union offered Goupil prints, including Mount's musical pendants, as premiums to subscribers, and over the next year purportedly held exhibitions in some forty American cities. (6)

Mount anticipated being the first to benefit from the International Art-Union's pledge to segregate "a sufficient sum ... for the purpose of sending one American student to Europe for the term of two years." (7) Schaus assured him of at least one year's stipend to work in Paris; but upon reflection Mount declined. Faced with a requirement to paint four pictures for Goupil during the year, he opted to "be free on Long Island [rather] than a slave in Paris." (8) Still, he remained interested in Paris, judging by the fact that as late as January 1852 he advertised in New York's francophone Courrier des Etats-Unis for lodgings with a French family who would teach him their native language. (9) There is no indication he found such lodgings, but he did generate four more pictures for Goupil from his Long Island studio.