Agents of Circulation: Entrepreneurs and Rivals
7. The Frame Maker/Picture Dealer: A Crucial Intermediary in the Nineteenth-Century American Popular Print Market
© 2021 Erika Piola, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0247.07
In July 1832, in an advertisement published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, British-born James S. Earle (1806–1879) begged ‘leave to inform his friends and the public … that he [had] commenced [his] business …’ of a looking glass and picture frame manufactory on the 100 block of South Fifth Street. Earle promoted his moderated rates and prompt attention to ‘orders’ in which prints received second billing only to looking glasses.1 During Earle’s near fifty years in the business, the entrepreneur who professionally described himself more often as a frame maker, always sold prints. Engravings, often European in provenance, predominantly constituted his picture stock.
Philadelphia frame-maker-turned-picture dealer William Smith also left a visible, if smudgy, professional mark on the mirror of the antebellum American picture trade. Smith, who is less well-documented than Earle, operated on the other end of the spectrum of this bifurcated profession. He entered the field in the 1850s, amid the rise in popularity of the more affordable and efficiently-executed lithographic parlor print. Engravings and lithographs published by him and some including a copyright statement in his, the artist’s, or the printer’s name, comprised his pictures for sale. Since at least the late eighteenth century, Philadelphia looking glass and frame makers who were also picture dealers, publishers, and sometimes printers have played a role in the development of an American print market.2
Philadelphia is one of the few American cities able to serve as a focal point to examine the democratization of the nineteenth-century picture market in the antebellum United States. By the early nineteenth century, a national art movement had gained momentum, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic city, spurred by developments in printing, domestic art training, and the art trade’s lessening dependence on European imports.3 Established with missions to foster the cultivation and appreciation of American art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA, founded in 1805) and the subscription-based American Art-Union (AAU) of New York and its counterpart the Art-Union of Philadelphia (AUP), chartered in 1842 and 1844 respectively, were integral to the national movement and to the trade practices of the frame maker.
When established as a shareholding institution by several of Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizens, and as a classical art academy by three of its most successful artists, PAFA sought to facilitate American training of working artists in tandem with enabling patronage-based professional development. By the 1810s, however, the Academy had evolved into an exhibition space for a paying public to view American art not as purchasers, but as ‘middlebrow amateurs’.4 Art unions lauded as ‘[having] more effect in producing the growing taste for beauty in forms and colors, among all classes, than all others combined’ served a complementary, parallel role in fostering an American art market for the non-elite.5 Sustained by membership fees affordable by the middle classes, the institutions organized by the socially elite or by artists offered an annual subscription premium of an engraving, purchased paintings by American artists and distributed them as lottery prizes, and oversaw free, public art galleries among their multiple means to create educated consumers of art from a wider socioeconomic base.
Between the 1820s and 1850s, an American market distributing American and European-made prints to the middle- and lower-middle classes more fully developed in concert with the establishment of American art unions, the evolution of PAFA, and the fomenting of implicit trade rules by frame makers. When the Inquirer reported in May 1840 on the Future Prospects of the Fine Arts in America lecture delivered by literary scholar Rev. George W. Bethune, it underlined the forging synergistic dynamic of the Academy, Unions, and frame makers in creating a viable print market and sustaining the latter’s trade. In the lecture, reported to the newspaper’s wide readership, Bethune advocated that ‘well-executed engravings of good pictures are incomparably better than middling paintings’ and when hung on the walls of one’s house were means for the ‘cultivation of the [American] domestic virtue — love of home’.6 Delivered at the opening of the new exhibition hall of the Philadelphia Artists’ Fund Society, the artists of the Society, like the frame makers, sought the financial rewards of those ‘well-executed engravings’. PAFA, AAU, AUP, and Earle, and later Smith worked in concert with and in reaction to this climate, inculcating all classes to appreciate and consume art, particularly American art. These actors helped to create a print market based on reproductions, reprints, and reuses of existing ‘good pictures’ and ‘middling paintings’. Within this culture, graphic material from artists’ designs, whether prepared in the context of a professional commission, patronage, or a collaborative endeavour, was produced, distributed, and consumed. The artists involved rarely claimed ownership of their work or initiated litigation.7
The process for the production and publication of the prints sustaining the emerging market was usually a collaborative one. The execution of the design, drawing, and intaglio engraving/or lithography of a work was not typically completed by the same person. An artist created the design, an engraver or lithographer placed it onto a printing surface, and the printer printed it onto paper with print runs ranging from a few hundred copies to several thousand copies. A publisher, who could be the printer or a frame maker/picture dealer, sold the print through their shop or through canvassers. The reproduced work could be of an original painting commissioned or purchased by the publisher, who would be its owner. Conversely, the artist could commission the publisher to reproduce their painting, of which they were the owner. Prints, frequently after original paintings that were often also displayed in frame makers’ warerooms, were mainstays in the stock of these dual-role entrepreneurs.
Whereas intaglio engravings in these dealers’ stocks, which could take several months to produce, were described by cultural critics as ‘the nearest approach that can be made to the individuality of a painting,’ they debated whether the lithographs the tradesmen had for sale, which could take only days to execute, had any ‘real claims to art’ to the works having a ‘spirit … no merely imitative art can ascertain’.8
In 1802, the amendment to the US Copyright Act to include legal protection for the creation of ‘historical and other prints’ was enacted.9 Despite being eligible for copyright, antebellum-era prints included in the frame makers’ traceable stocks of engravings and later lithographs only sometimes contained a statement of copyright. Historical scenes and the ‘other prints’ of portraits or views typically encompassed those presented as having been registered for copyright.10 The visual content of prints, even those originally issued with a copyright statement, often led multiple lives betwixt and between print mediums and publishers. Unclear transfers of copyright, which became more nebulous when a work no longer contained a statement, permeate these multiple iterations. However, copyright infringement cases against antebellum print sellers, as well as those brought forth by antebellum engravers, lithographers, and printers, are not common in the public record.11 Frame makers/picture dealers appear to have acted within a professional network irrespective to, uninfluenced by, and outside of the confines of a law that was often understood idiosyncratically.
Within this milieu, frame makers, commonly associated with art unions and with their storefronts — geographically clustered together and near art institutions in a given city — imbued prints with artistic, cultural, and commercial value. These nineteenth-century art agents represent a touchstone in unpacking the cultural mechanisms influencing socioeconomic values of copies of art in the form of the mass-produced print. However, despite the enduring presence of frame makers/picture dealers during the nineteenth century, scholars have yet to fully explore the significant intermediary role that such tradesmen had within the popular print market of a major American city.
This chapter explores the cultural field of these overlooked figures, with a focus on the Philadelphia frame maker, and asks the following question: how did these diversified entrepreneurs try to distinguish themselves, yet conform to the structures and patterns that characterized their trade?12 The professional networks and tools, as well as the interrelationships, of these businessmen within the art world and trade represent underexplored dimensions in the construction and operations of the American popular print market. Frame makers/picture dealers play a consequential role in understanding how the nineteenth-century print consumer came to define and own art.
Philadelphia Frame Makers’ Role in the Print Market
When Earle announced the opening of his frame-making business in the early 1830s, the popular print trade in Philadelphia was beginning a new era. Lithographs had entered the market. The first successful Philadelphia commercial lithographic firm had been recently established when the existing print market was essentially equated with intaglio engravings.13 By the turn of the next decade around twenty-four framers, glaziers, and looking-glass manufacturers, including Earle, C. N. Robinson (b. ca. 1790), Thomas J. (ca. 1805–1859), and later Joseph S. (ca. 1818–1871) Natt, helped the city’s denizens to beautify themselves and their walls, operating in shops clustered closely together on Chestnut Street.14 Their businesses were often acknowledged and lauded in the popular press during the height of the AAU’s success at mid-century.
Robinson, active in the carver and gilder trade since the 1810s, received consistent mention in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1849, Inquirer columnists noted his store on the 900 block of Chestnut Street as crowded, ‘morning, noon, and night’ and implied that his reputation and location were so well-established, his address did not need to be stated (see Figure 2). In the October 17 edition of the paper that year, he garnered high praise for his fairness in picture- dealing.15 Like Robinson, Earle had a presence in the mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia press. ‘Fine Arts’ articles noted that his gallery, which had relocated to the 800 block of Chestnut Street by 1839, as one for the ‘lovers of the … beautiful’, as well as an exemplar of a ‘leading print and painting establishment’ in the city (Figure 1 and Figure 3).16
For the ‘lovers of the beautiful’, Philadelphia frame makers’/picture dealers’ galleries were free to visit and offered a selection of prints affordable by a cross-section of consumers. Earle’s newspaper advertisements capitalized on this rhetoric of affordability, and he often promoted his gallery as constantly open and proffering a ‘large collection of Prints, with portrait frames, of the […] latest patterns’ to be disposed ‘on the most reasonable terms’.17 Before the frame makers’ free galleries had a palpable presence in the city and press, PAFA at Tenth and Chestnut Streets, located within a block of the AUP and the Earle cohort galleries, served in the preceding decades as the city’s major public space catering to art consumers.
Soon after its establishment in 1805, PAFA began to hold ticket-based exhibitions of contemporary American art, including those organized by the Society of Artists formed in 1810 to challenge the ideology of art based on classical models. A means for the institution to remain financially solvent, it was also a means, as Yvette Piggush has shown, for PAFA’s paying art spectators, rather than the shareholding patrons or the artists, to control the trajectory of the genres of art produced and exhibited. Spectators who could not necessarily afford to purchase a painting directly from an artist and who were influenced by the popular literary, theatrical, entertainment, and tourism culture of the time became central actors in the type of art seen inside — and bought outside the walls of PAFA. An expanding antebellum art audience wanted and expected artists to produce historical and narrative-themed works, rather than classical ones, that provided something ‘sensational to see, to feel, and to write about’.18
In turn, the artists wanted to capitalize on that demand and earn the financial benefits of a wider audience seeking an emotional connection with art. Frame makers/picture dealers like Earle literally and figuratively situated themselves as intermediaries whose role it was to transform PAFA viewers of art into purchasers of art. As observed in the 1840s by AUP manager Prof. George Reed, ‘lookers-on who belong to every condition of life …’ were thronging print shop windows as a result of ‘the innocent pleasure from works of art [being] felt by increasing numbers’.19
Owing to their location in the city, the Chestnut Street frame makers regularly interacted with PAFA’s (and later AUP’s) middle-class patron base who sought an emotional connection with a framed work of art (painting or print) in their own home, and not only in a public display space.20 In practical terms, they could also serve the ‘lookers-on’ who could not afford a painting, nor possibly the admission fee to the Academy, nor a subscription to an art union. Enticed persons could use Earle and his neighboring cohorts as ‘gift shops’. Any patron of these tradesmen, for twenty-five cents — about the same price to see an exhibition at PAFA — could purchase a framed print suggestive of the paintings at the Academy that they had viewed, felt, read, or heard about (Figure 4). Whether the working-class laborers in Philadelphia who earned nearly $300 a year were one of Reed’s noted lookers-on who visited the ‘fair’ Chestnut Street frame makers for ‘lovers of the beautiful’ can only be speculated, but they had that choice.21
In 1856, when William Smith began to be listed as a frame maker on the 700 block of South Third Street, the trade had grown to thirty-five in the field. He evolved into a frame maker/ picture dealer within a few years. Earle and his long-standing peers worked in the cultural and commercial section of the city and near hotels, the AUP gallery, and PAFA (Figure 2 and Figure 8). Smith worked below the corridor of the city’s printing district near Third and Chestnut Streets. Unlike his longstanding Philadelphia peers, he operated close to and en route to printers, print publishers, and coloring establishments, such as John Childs (100 block South Third Street) who provided other professional networking opportunities — including his lithographs being published by Smith.
While Earle relied on direct marketing and good press in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a ca. 1863 catalog of steel engravings and lithographs that were published by Smith suggests that he focused on canvassers and the wholesale market.22 Although a comprehensive list of titles sold by Earle and Smith and the demographics of those who purchased them cannot be compiled from extant records, similarities and differences in both men’s stocks of available prints and their patronage are discernible through newspaper ads, Smith’s catalog, and extant graphic materials.
Patrons of Earle would be privy to a stock of imported European prints after European artists. Based on Earle’s title lists in the press in the 1850s, the picture dealer focused his imported stock on European landscapes, and religious and genre works, and with most priced between one and six dollars. The genre prints were often after popular British, German, and French genre and animal painters, such as Edwin Landseer, Rosa Bonheur, and Thomas Faed, as well as Pre-Raphaelites who strove for realism in their works. In contemporary terms, these were more fine than popular art prints, and ones published in Europe during a period before international copyright agreements came into force.23
Usually promoted in the dozens and without sizes or prices in the newspaper notices, the prints’ artists, and not their engravers, are typically referenced in the advertisements — and generally by their last names only. The fact that Earle’s advertisements mentioned the artists suggests that he thought his (middle-class) audience was familiar with them, perhaps from visiting his and other Philadelphia galleries.24 By all appearances, the social value of Earle’s primary print stock in the market for the middle class and those who emulated them relied on European cachet.25 Nonetheless, Earle also sold prints after American artists of imagery that was ‘sensational to see and to feel’. In 1849, A. C. Smith’s lithograph after Philadelphia Artists’ Society Fund organizer and artist Joshua Shaw’s painting Travelling of Village Tinker received high praise.26 As part of a set, the prints, when promoted without a price in an article in the Inquirer, were characterized ‘as admirably suited for parlor ornaments … which cannot but find a response in every feeling heart.’27
Unlike Earle, Smith newspaper advertisements are rare. His circa-1863 catalog with retail prices, as well as a ‘Notice to Agents and the Trade’ suggests he sometimes sold his prints directly to the consumer, but more often through canvassers and at wholesale. Tellingly, in terms of who may have purchased Smith’s prints, he advises in his ‘Notice’ that ‘The most successful method to sell these pictures is to allow your purchasers to pay for them by weekly instal[l]ments’.28 Smith courted a retail print consumer with less discretionary income for whom knowing the price upfront and being able to pay in installments was appealing.
The catalog lists over 100 prints with ‘size to frame in inches’. They are organized by engravings, lithographs, and ‘colored sporting pictures’. Like Earle, Smith ‘always [had] on hand’ European prints, including works by Bonheur and Landseer. However, these represented a minor part of his advertised stock. From the catalog and his known extant prints, his commercial wheelhouse in terms of his picture dealing by the end of the antebellum era rested on prints published by him, many likely as reprints. Engravings and lithographs, measuring between 8 x 10 and 33 x 44 inches and typically depicting genre, sentimental, religious, historical, political, and portrait views predominated. The engravings sold at retail prices between twelve cents and three dollars, while the lithographs sold for between ten cents and five dollars.
Size, medium, and color variably and seemingly inconsistently affected the price. Plain copies of the same title in color were typically half the price, but a color printed lithograph of The Court of Death indicated as being after the renowned painting of American painter Rembrandt Peale was priced less than half (seventy-five cents) of a similarly-sized, plain genre lithograph after the European artist Jacob Eickholtz (two dollars). European cachet was seemingly at play as well with certain Smith prints. However, it also conceivable that the Smith Court lithograph was a reprint from the original printing stone of the Peale color lithograph first published by and with a statement of copyright in the name of showman Gordon Q. Colton (1814–1898), the owner of the painting at the time. Through an extensive advertisement in the Public Ledger in January 1860, Colton exhorts that since he was able to print 100,000 of the lithographs (which he called engravings), he could sell them by subscription for one dollar each. A price, he notes, that would not be possible if he could only print 5,000.29 The chromolithographic process afforded such large print runs in a way that the engraving process did not. The Smith seventy-five cent price intimates the market value of the lithograph as a reprint did not decrease substantially in a few years. As will be discussed later, other prints in Smith’s stock prompt additional speculation as to how prices emanated in frame makers’ stocks of prints.
Whereas Earle’s title lists made little effort to introduce his stock to unfamiliar consumers, Smith’s catalog employed promotional epithets about the works in an effort to appeal to a wider consumer base. Whether those targeted purchased the prints or not is not known from available sources. The assumption can be drawn that white Philadelphians were the primary purchasers in the print market of a city where the Black population was about four percent at mid-century.30 However, a broad cross-section of Philadelphia society, including women, African Americans, and the working class, especially with a payment plan, could have acquired The Cottage Fireside, ‘a charming steel plate for every home’ for fifty cents or We Praise Thee O God! ‘for every Christian home’ for one dollar and fifty cents. Similarly, in this vein, an engraved portrait of William Lloyd Garrison captioned as the ‘Advocate of Human Rights’ selling for twenty-five cents may have enticed persons from the city’s white abolitionist community and/or the Black community active in civil rights to purchase it. Frame makers/picture dealers were entrepreneurs active in a growing popular art market. They wanted to leverage this growth, and in Smith’s case, he used personal connections through item-specific descriptions of the prints more often than relying on the cachet of an artist’s name or a European provenance as a marketing tactic.
Smith and Earle also appealed to niche markets by gender and age to sell their prints (and frames). In 1859, when Earle requested the special attention of ladies to review his spring sale of original art paintings at auction, he could conceivably presume his ‘Fine Art’ department of engravings, including sentimental prints, would receive the women’s attention as well.31 More middle-class women could readily and individually purchase a sentimental print like Grandmother’s Darling after Ernst Meyer (seventy-five cents), one of his least expensive offered, than an original oil painting for hundreds of dollars. In a related manner, Smith published a complementary pair of ten-cent lithographs that appealed to children and depicted a boy in Morning Prayer. ‘God Bless Papa’ and a girl in Evening Prayer. ‘God Bless Mama’ that tugged at parental and juvenile heart strings meant to loosen maternal purse strings. Smith also proactively solicited to the young adult market through the engraving Sparking (fifty cents) of a scene of courting that ‘Bachelors and Young Ladies should have …’. Originally issued through the AAU in 1844, the print, as will be discussed later, was one of a number by art collectives that Smith reissued.
Engravings found a second life through Smith’s tradesmanship: not only through reprints, but also through the fluid exchange of imagery between mediums that was common in this period. Given the preponderance of titles in Smith’s catalog and known prints that were reprints or reiterations, the practices of reuse and appropriation, which were not readily visible in Earle’s business, were foundational to Smith’s. Although Earle and Smith occupied different positions along a spectrum of frame-making and picture dealing, they could also work in synergistic tandem with each other in the development of their print stock after the same original artwork.
Rosa Bonheur’s most acclaimed painting, The Horse Fair, demonstrates this. The painting, which was displayed for a few weeks in fall 1857 at New York frame maker/picture dealer Williams, Stevens, Williams & Co.’s gallery and at Earle’s in the spring of 1858, was shown daily until 10PM at the latter. The hour was late enough that it allowed for even the laboring classes to peruse the splendid work as a form of evening entertainment. Engravings of the painting through subscription were available at Earle’s in 1858 and advertised at twenty dollars in 1859 (Figure 5). Less than five years later, Smith, in his catalog, advertised seventy-five cent lithographs after the painting.32 The less-wealthy admirers of the original Bonheur could acquire a print after it by paying in installments over several weeks. When sold by Earle as an engraving that cost several dollars it was likely not financially feasible for them.
Frame makers/picture dealers Earle and Smith employed different business strategies within their place in their trade and capitalized on a liminal space within the print market: one inhabited by an evolving pluralistic base of art consumers. Earle and his longstanding cohort catered to the middle class and their emulators through their location and newspaper advertisements. Smith focused his business on a wider cross-section of society by describing works based on personal connection and a print stock of reprints and reiterations. All frame makers sold prints and frames in a profession rooted in trade practices to cultivate this commercial marriage. But the frame makers would not have been so successful in fostering the development of a market for framed art in the absence of PAFA and the subscription art unions. These institutions also played a crucial role in nurturing the commercial marriage of prints with frames.
‘Growing Taste for Beauty in Forms and Colors’: Philadelphia Frame Makers and Subscription Art Unions
While frame makers inhabited a liminal space in relation to the Philadelphia picture consumer, allied institutions in their network did not. The Academy and later art unions defined their roles more singularly in the city’s visual culture. Companionate actors in broadening the art world, the unions and the Philadelphia frame makers bolstered each other as agents of the art trade.
When the AAU and the AUP were officially chartered in New York in 1842 and Philadelphia in 1844, European models in London, Switzerland, and Germany had been in existence since the late-eighteenth century.33 The AAU, which was previously called the Apollo Association (1839–1844), was organized by mainly wealthy, politically and socially conservative New York merchants, manufacturers, shippers, and newspaper men such as former Mayor Philip Hone. It sought to define what American art should be through its stated mission of the ‘promotion of the Fine Arts in the United States’.34 The AUP, which was managed by artists, merchants, and philanthropists, including John Sartain, Joseph Sill, and Rev. William Furness, took three years to become active in support of their mission of ‘the promotion of the Arts of Design throughout the United States’ and to ‘feed the eye’.35 By the time each union was established, frame makers and AAU and AUP members Earle, Robinson, and Natt had been in their trade for over a dozen years if not decades.
At its peak in 1849, the AAU distributed nationwide to nearly 19,000 subscribers, who paid the five-dollar membership fee, dozens of prints after American-made paintings the Union had borrowed, purchased, or commissioned. At around the same time, the AUP sustained about 1,900 subscribers, mostly regional. It followed most of the protocols of the AAU, including the price of the subscription fee, holding an annual art lottery, distributing gift prints after the work of American artists, publishing a bulletin, and maintaining a free gallery.36
In New York, the Art-Union managers chose paintings, including Richard Caton Woodville’s The Card Player (1846) (Figure 6) and William Ranney’s Marion Crossing the Pedee (1850), to be engraved. The chosen paintings were often by American artists and composed with a historical or national theme and intended didactic undertone. Other paintings in stock were described in their Bulletin, sold at their New York gallery on Broadway, or offered as lottery prizes to the subscribers who helped pay for them. But it was the Union’s mass-produced prints, distributed with a statement of copyright in the Union’s name, which served as their best instrument to demonstrate the power of art in the formation of a national culture.37
Overseen by more artists and engravers than the AAU, the AUP exhibited differing intentions in cultivating the appreciation of art through prints. This is evident in an early edition of the Union’s Transactions (1848). In a piece about the selected gift print for the year, the AUP managers focused the explanation of their selection more so in terms of the aesthetics of the work than its American subject matter which was typically the reason provided by the AAU for their chosen gift prints. In the choice of their long-awaited first premium (the first of six in total), the Philadelphia managers exhorted that ‘Many pictures of the highest grade in composition, colour, and expression, are not well fitted to be reduced unto black and white; and hence, among a large number of works of Art of high excellence examined by the board, it was no easy thing to select such a Picture as would combine the desired requisites.’38 In the end, local artist Emmanuel Leutzes’s painting John Knox and Mary Queen of Scots — depicting a defining moment in the United Kingdom’s, rather than America’s, history — prevailed as the print engraved by manager Sartain. This labored and propagandized rationale suggests that unlike the AAU, the AUP’s goal as a national organization — which did not consistently include a copyright statement in the Union’s name on their distributed prints — was not ultimately to try to promote ‘America’ through art, but instead the idea that every American had a right to good art ‘to feed the eye’.39 Whether it represented an art-appreciation mission to promote America or to feed the eye, an art collective’s goals were best brought to fruition through a framed print.
By 1847, a New York news article about technical improvements to machine-made ornamental frames attributed to an ‘Art Union’ proclaimed, ‘We consider that to produce good and cheap frames is second only in importance to producing prints good and cheap’.40 Invented by British frame maker Charles Frederick Bielefeld (1803–1864), the iron-fortified paper mâché frames allowed for the ‘meanest wooden shelter in which a work of art ever found refuge…’ Priced as low as a shilling (i.e., about twelve cents), ornate frames were now comparable in aesthetics and cost to the print that would fit in them (Figure 7). The Union lauded the invention for its significance to engravings that ‘have been deprived of an opportunity of effectively ‘doing their spiriting’ from their circumstance of being unframed …’41 A print without a frame was demeaned in purpose. The frame gave the print more social cachet. The union of print and frame emulated middle-class décor. The print would not just be seen, but felt. As a discretionary purchase, a frame was justifiable and necessary for the proper cultivation of Bethune’s domestic virtue.42 Art is not art unless displayed, nor complete without a ‘wooden shelter’. It was the print consumer’s civic duty to purchase an accompanying frame when purchasing a print.
This sentiment was echoed in an August 30, 1849 Philadelphia Inquirer article referencing frame maker Robinson. Robinson often announced his display of prints, including ones issued by the AAU, in the press.43 The columnist adamantly notes:
The taste for paintings and prints is quite extended as it was formerly, but our citizens do not use them so generally as they did, as decorations for drawing rooms … We think this is an error. There is nothing which imparts to a parlor or drawing room such an air of comfortable elegance as handsomely framed paintings or prints…44
The AAU dissolved in 1852. The union was mired in controversy in its final years because its art lotteries were criticized as a form of gambling. Its competition and redundancy with the International Art Union, as well as slow print production and distribution, were also factors in its demise.45 By this time, the AAU had cast a defining influence over the rationale of the visual culture of the time: one that held that not only painted but also printed works, especially framed, equated to art. In Philadelphia, the city’s picture dealers worked in tandem with art unions to cultivate this principle so central to their trade.
A distinction between AAU and AUP reinforced this principle. Unlike the AAU, the AUP let a lottery winner ‘select for himself’ their painting.46 While it deflected the accusations of gambling often directed toward the AAU, the AUP’s self-selection approach also echoed the consumerism requisite to the commercial success of the galleries of the Philadelphia frame makers/picture dealers, who were also Union members. In accordance with the AUP’s goal to ‘feed the eye’ and their established intermediary position with PAFA, Philadelphia frame makers were optimally positioned to take advantage of the mechanisms of their local art trade culture.
In early 1849, soon after attorney and AUP corresponding secretary William Tilghman consulted with the AAU, the AUP opened ‘day and evening’ its Free Gallery of Art on the 800 block of Chestnut Street (Figure 8). Almost immediately, frame maker/picture dealers were involved in choosing a site. The site was to be close to PAFA so the AUP gallery would ‘tend to the prosperity of the Academy … and the advancement of the objects proposed by the Art Union’.47 Robinson originally brokered the deal, his son T. J. Robinson was approached and declined to sublet the building, and the frame makers Andrews & Meeser were finally engaged to oversee the site and contribute towards the rent. The firm framed the union’s ‘specimen engravings’, acted as independent picture dealers, and advertised in the Union’s monthly periodical the Art Union Reporter.48 This complementary yet independent role shaped the relationship between the Unions and the Philadelphia frame makers. When the name of AAU’s honorary subscriptions secretary in Philadelphia, merchant William Goodrich, was announced in the newspaper in 1848, this sentiment of simultaneous independence and mutual benefit was evident. The columnist commented: ‘Philadelphia possesses liberality sufficient to do her share to its support, although she has a kindred institution at home’.49
This liberality enabled Earle and long-standing colleagues Natt and Robinson to be active in the American and Philadelphia art unions as both members and secretaries, as well as allowing their warerooms to serve as places of distribution for the Unions’ premium prints. Earle even rented a room to AUP for their early meetings, and served as secretary for a number of national and international unions, including the AAU, the Edinburgh Art Union, and the London Art Union.50 This mutually beneficial relationship extended into advertising in the unions’ periodicals. In the case of Earle, the Philadelphia union saw no issue with conjointly promoting their Free Gallery and Earle’s Free Gallery of Art that displayed two hundred and fifty paintings,’ including ‘gems which are ranked among the best productions of our own native, as well as foreign artists.’51 Both desired art patrons, and Earle also sought consumers of not only paintings and prints, but also the frames needed for the works of art to do their ‘spiriting’.
This mutually beneficial competition for consumers of graphic works between frame makers and the AUP was acknowledged in 1849 in Sartain’s Union Magazine, the Philadelphia literary and art periodical published by AUP manager Sartain. Two years following Joseph S. Natt’s rebuilding of his storefront a block away from AUP and Robinson’s relocation to the 900 block of Chestnut Street, the magazine observed:
The large public attendance at the Art Union Gallery and the success of the enterprise […] soon excited the rivalry of those who had formerly been the agents […] now we have four large and beautiful picture and looking glass stores, […] superior to any ever before known in our city.52
Earle, whose gallery was also in the neighborhood, was almost certainly one of the four art and picture dealers who distributed engravings described in the same periodical as ‘now widely circulated of the best kinds, and instead of the grotesque libels on art which formerly were to be found in every house, we now see works of superior merit’.53 The “friendly” competition between the frame makers’ galleries and that of AUP would not last. The AUP dissolved about 1855.
The unions organized with a mission to cultivate art appreciation among the middle classes supported frame makers and vice versa. Established frame makers, such as Earle, and those who were new to the field, such as Smith, buttressed the cultural missions of the unions to encourage the appreciation and consumption of art. The picture dealer worked to create that need and met it before, during, and following the demise of unions. Individuals of all means could visit their galleries, day or night, and for the frame maker, the patron was an active agent in the choice of a print, rather than merely a passive recipient. In this context, art unions worked in concert with frame makers, fostering a mutable relationship between commercial, aesthetic, and material values of prints for their patrons. An article reprinted in an 1866 edition of the American Art Journal acknowledges, albeit sarcastically, this outcome and the centrality of the frame maker. With a tone critical of the success of the London art unions, which were deemed to be ‘wrong in principle and unserviceable to good art’ in their construction of a wider art consumer base with a broader appreciation of what constitutes art, the columnist asserted that ‘[t]he only people who benefit by these Unions are the picture frame makers’.54
Frame Maker/Picture Dealers, Print Values, and Copyright
The art unions and frame makers/picture dealers, along with PAFA, commodified art across socioeconomic classes through their implicit and explicit missions and practices. An increasing number of viewers of art became material consumers of art during the nineteenth century. Through the will of PAFA and its internal and external constituents to cultivate a national art culture through universal access to art, American-made prints after American-made paintings by American-trained artists infused the antebellum print market. Patrons, who through cultural agents like the art unions and frame makers, came to believe that their dwellings were not a home without pictures on the wall, in part constructed this market. While the unions distributed engravings after original works that they denoted as art to their patrons, frame makers Earle and Smith had on hand American and European prints for purchase that their consumers ultimately judged and purchased as such. These buyers were able to acquire a ten-cent lithograph and complementary frame, and they did not need to be members of the middle classes to afford it.
Within this print market culture, we can glean anecdotal traces of trade strategies and agreements, and socioeconomic factors influencing the prices and titles offered within frame makers’ stocks of prints. Through contextual analysis of an Earle advertisement of 1859, and particularly through surveying select titles in Smith’s catalog, one can directly and judiciously trace the commercial and social life cycle of a print published and/or sold by dealers in cases where questions of copyright may have been a factor.
As noted, Earle rarely included prices in his newspaper listings. He did so in an April 1859 advertisement for nearly two dozen European engravings.55 The prints, priced from twenty cents to twenty dollars, were arranged by order of cost. Titles included an engraving after popular German painter Franz Winterhalter’s literary painting Florinde, priced at $12.50.56 Exhibited in spring 1857 by Goupil & Co. in New York and reproduced by the company as an engraving, the painting, described by a reviewer as a scene with a ‘voluptuous expression’, was further exhibited at the gallery of Earle’s Boston peer Williams & Everett. Concurrently, Williams solicited subscriptions for a print after the painting at the same $12.50 uncolored price as originally advertised by Goupil and later by Earle in 1859.57 In other words, a price had been set by Goupil and honored by Earle and Williams. One picture dealer was not undercutting or upselling another in a different city. Implicit trade rules had been derived and followed by the frame makers, who sold high end prints after paintings ‘on tour’ in their galleries.
In comparison, Smith’s advertised stock in his catalog included prints that were often previously published by another publisher, including a number sold by the AAU or Cosmopolitan Art Association (CAA). These prints would have contained statements of copyright in the name of the union when first issued. Although extant engravings of the previous union titles with Smith’s imprint have yet to be found, given the known reprinted works by Smith (including engravings by Sartain) and bibliographic notes, he most likely published restrikes of the union engravings from the original plates.58 By all accounts, Smith was not a member of a union, but he still profited from their existence.
The aforementioned Sparking was one of a number of AAU engravings listed by Smith in his catalog (Figure 9). The catalog shows that Smith transformed the marketing rhetoric used by the Union to expand his consumer base. Advertised by him for ‘Bachelors and Young Ladies’ and for fifty cents (ten times less than the AAU subscription price for the same work), it displays a scene of polite courtship even beyond the sight of a chaperone. Smith promotes the picture not for American homespunness with universal appeal as did the Union in 1844, but by using catalog descriptions and prices that aimed to attract young adults.59
As a point of comparison, Smith’s catalog also contains a series of titles he notes as previously issued by the CAA, an association established by Ohio publisher Chauncey L. Derby and active between 1854 and 1861, with a branch in New York. The Association, similar to Smith, distributed restrikes from plates engraved for often-failed or bankrupt publishers, or for failed subscription opportunities.60 In 1858, the CAA acquired the painting, printing plate, and copyright of The Village Blacksmith after British artist J. F. Herring from New York frame makers/picture dealers Williams, Stevens, and Williams.61 The Smith catalog provides a snapshot of the ‘third’ life of this print in the marketplace.
Within a few years, Smith listed the 28 x 34 inch Village as from the ‘Cosmopolitan Art Collection’ at the previous CAA ‘price’ of the three-dollar subscriber’s fee. The CAA as the earlier publisher of the print proved consequential to its price. The restruck Sparking had been divorced from its first life as an AAU print twenty years earlier. Smith did not promote the relationship, and after two decades most consumers likely no longer remembered the connection. And if they did, the print would represent a bargain. The re-actualized and re-contextualized prints kept both unions present at different ends in later nineteenth-century mass visual culture. The reprinted Village promoted by Smith as both having ‘won the admiration of lovers of art in Europe and America’, and as ‘Herring’s unrivaled Picture’ retained a transparent stable price. The print’s attributed provenance as a widely-circulated and consumed art union engraving from the recent past informed its market (and social) value.62 Smith honored a price ‘set’ by the CAA by capitalizing on the residual socioeconomic presence of the Union with his consumer base from a cross-section of society. Similar to the implicit trade rules followed by Goupil, Williams & Everett, and Earle to honor a set price for Florinde with their consumer base on their end of the trade’s spectrum, Smith followed a similar strategy on his end of the market.
Without known extant copies of the aforementioned union prints bearing the Smith imprint, it is uncertain whether the works continued to contain statements of copyright. However, from a sample specimen of Smith titles with a traceable provenance from extant prints, it can be deduced that less than one quarter contained a copyright statement when issued previously. The focus of Smith’s catalog Washington’s Triumphal Entry into New York, November 25, 1783 was one of them (Figure 10).63 Whereas copyright status on the prints distributed by Earle can not be easily ascertained, of the known Smith prints, a small number, many portraits or historical images, do include a copyright statement. The statement is not always in Smith’s name, however: this is the case with Triumphal, which was registered for copyright in 1860 by Philadelphia postmaster George T. Perry. Priced at five dollars, the color historical print with a framing size of around 3 x 4 feet cost the most of all the titles Smith advertised in his catalog.
Described by Smith, and previously by copyright holder Perry, as a ‘beautiful print’ and the ‘best work of its kind ever produced in this country…’ the highlighted Triumphal represents a case study of the idiosyncrasies of copyright, and an outsider trying to work amid the nuanced dynamics created in the art market by the frame makers and their cohort. Print consumers assumed no overt financial risks when purchasing a ‘reprinted’ engraving or lithograph even if it violated copyright. Picture dealers and printers who were also publishers, on the other hand, did run a risk of retaliation in the form of costly litigation. However, public shaming of perceived copyright violation through the popular press was the more likely form of retaliation. Such was the case for Triumphal.
In January 1862, Perry placed a recurring advertisement with a ‘caution’ in a Northern newspaper for his ‘new national picture’ printed in oil colors by P. S. Duval & Son that had been ‘duly copyrighted, &c, &c’.64 The caution warned of a ‘badly executed copy’ that did not convey his ‘BEAUTIFUL IDEA’. Perry believed his exhortation in the press that he was a copyright holder empowered his caution and it would be heeded by the public he was soliciting.65 He thought the badly executed copy — a print ‘thrown out upon the public’ printed by Duval rival Thomas Sinclair — would not be purchased. The ‘new and beautiful print’ executed and printed by Duval would be. Complicating this narrative, however, is the fact that the Sinclair copy originally also contained a copyright statement in Perry’s name. Furthermore, there was also a second Sinclair copy in another publisher’s and copyright holder’s name in circulation.
Containing the variant title Washington’s Grand Entry … and showing a nearly identical visual trope of Washington on horseback and promenading down a crowded New York street, the ‘badly executed’ print circulated with two different imprints. One named Perry as publisher and copyright holder. The print was registered by him on December 15, 1860. Another included an imprint showing Philadelphia frame maker/print publisher John Smith as publisher and copyright holder (Figure 11). The copyright statement on the print was also dated 1860. Perry possibly transferred his copyright protection of the Sinclair print to John Smith in less than a month, but no transferred registration of copyright is evident.66 During the same month, as deduced from extant copies of the Duval print and a December 31, 1860 registration deposit, Perry had also copyrighted Triumphal, his ‘new national picture’.67 Consequently, three prints with two similar designs, three different imprints, and two different statements of copyright were in circulation. As can be construed from the 1862 advertisement, the prints, and the varying statements of copyright, Perry had opted, through the court of public opinion, to market and reap the profits of his ‘duly copyrighted’ Duval lithograph. From the print’s inclusion and focus in the William Smith catalog, Perry appears to have lost the case he pled in the press. The public shaming to suppress the sale of the Sinclair print did not promote sales of the Duval print. Ultimately, Perry needed a frame maker/picture dealer to sell his print depicting his ‘beautiful idea’.
These multiple versions and states with a Perry statement of copyright suggest that Perry, a postmaster by profession, poorly understood the rules of a trade in which copyright did not equal control of a print’s circulation. For Perry, copyright leveraged by an ‘author’ of original art through public shaming (as opposed to litigation) would not prove to be a zero-sum game as he desired. Consequently, Smith, rather than Perry, was selling the print through his two-fold marketing and consumer network, up to a year following the appearance of the Boston ad. Smith sold the color lithograph for one dollar less than was advertised by Perry. Smith leveraged his understanding of the customs of his trade. Litigation of copyright was not an influence. It did not restrict nor promote sales of prints as a marketing tactic. In the world of graphic art, an effective sales strategy hinged on finding the right price point and advertising channel, as well as matching the print with a complementary frame.
Conclusion
Frame makers/print dealers acted as consequential intermediaries in nurturing art appreciation among mass society during the antebellum era. The picture dealers fostered this role with an evolving consumer base whose taste for prints developed within a cultural nexus of public galleries, the didactic missions of antebellum art unions and institutions, and tradesmen who capitalized on their dual positioning within the worlds of art and trade. As the print market democratized, copyright remained an idiosyncratically understood legal right, and frame maker/picture dealers held an important, yet often forgotten role in the culturally-constructed commercial and social life cycle of antebellum prints. Agents operating within a bifurcated trade, Earle, Smith, and their peers helped to foster the opinion that a print is a work of art, whether fine, popular, or even bad, and especially when placed in a frame. These antebellum men occupied a profession that impelled the creation of a universal appeal for art as a cultural commodity.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Archival and Graphic Material
Alphonse Bigot, Washington’s Grand Entry into New York No. 25th, 1783 (Philadelphia: George T. Perry, 1860), chromolithograph, Huntington Library, Art collections, Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles. CA, priJLC_POL_002714.
——, Washington’s Grand Entry into New York Nov. 25th, 1783 (Philadelphia: John Smith, 1860), chromolithograph, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, New York Public Library, New York, Eno 46++.
Christian Schussele, Washington’s Triumphal Entry into New York, November 25, 1783 (Philadelphia: Published by William Smith, ca. 1863), chromolithograph, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, ***GC-American Revolution [P.2279].
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Alexander, Isabella, Copyright Law and the Public Interest (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2010).
Bently, L. and M. Kretschmer, eds., Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), www.copyrighthistory.org.
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/summary_berne.html.
Bethune, George W. The Prospects of Art in the United States: An Address Before the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia, at the Opening of their Exhibition, May 1840 (Philadelphia: Printed for the Artists’ Fund Society, 1840).
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Orcutt, Kimberly with Allan McLeod, ‘Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 18 (2019), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.1.14.
On Exhibition at Williams & Everett’s, No. 234 Washington Street, Boston, the Original Painting of Florinde, by Winterhalter (Exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts, 1852.) Admission 25 cents. (Boston,[ca. 1857]), Library of Congress, Portfolio 61, Folder 15, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.06101500/?sp=2.
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Washington’s Triumphal Entry into New York (Philadelphia: Published by William Smith, [ca. 1863]). Library Company of Philadelphia, Am 1860 Washi 111635.O.
1 ‘Looking-Glass & Picture Frame Manufactory. James S. Earle’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 July 1832, p. 4. Earle was the nephew of James Earle (1770–1855), a Philadelphia glazier, gallery owner, and business partner of Thomas Sully.
2 For brevity in professional identification, looking glass/frame makers/picture dealers will be referred to here as frame makers or frame makers/picture dealers. Extant business records for Earle and Smith are not known to exist.
3 For a compendium of commentaries contemporary to the period and representative of the movement, see American Art to 1900: A Documentary History, ed. by Sarah Burns and John Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See also E. McSherry Fowble, Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680–1880: A Selective Catalogue of the Winterthur Museum Collection (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987).
4 Yvette Piggush, ‘Visualizing Early American Audiences: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Allston’s Dead Man Restored’, American Art Studies, 9 (2011), 716–747 (p. 747).
5 ‘The Fine Arts in Scotland. The Edinburgh Art Union,’ Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 January 1855, p. 2. Educator and amateur painter J. J. Mapes expressed a similar sentiment in his 1851 essay about the indispensable role of fine arts to civilization, and noted ‘Our Academies of Art and Art Unions have done much to improve the public taste, and their influence cannot but prove most beneficial’. J. J. Mapes, ‘Usefulness of the Arts of Design,’ Sartain’s Union Magazine, 8 (1851), 211–213 (p.212).
6 The Artists’ Fund Society, formed in 1835, was the first art organization in Philadelphia managed exclusively by artists, with the mission of ‘the cultivation of skill, the diffusion of taste, and the encouragement of living professional talent in the arts of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Engraving, as may best conduce the primary purpose of benevolence’. ‘Dr. Bethune’s Lecture. The Fine Arts’. Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 May 1840, p.2.
7 Oren Bracha has argued that a radical transformation of American copyright law occurred during the nineteenth century. An incomplete, convoluted, and contradictory ideology of romantic authorship and originality emerged. Oren Bracha, ‘The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early American Copyright’, The Yale Law Journal, 118 (2008), 186–271.
8 ‘Fictitious Engravings’, Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 4, December 1860, 176 and United States Gazette, 14 February 1832, p. 2.
9 See ‘1802 Amendment (1802)’, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), ed. by Lionel Bently and Martin Kretschmer, http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord.php?id=record_us_1802 (particularly section 3).
10 Deduction made from survey of cataloged prints dated between 1800 and 1860 and with a statement of copyright in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.
11 Reviews of J. B. (John Bradford) Wallace et al., Reports of Cases Determined in the Circuit Court United States for the Third Circuit, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1849–1871) revealed no cases focused on infringement of copyright related to prints, engravings, or lithographs in the Philadelphia court between 1801 and 1862. Binns v. Woodruff is the exemplar case of the period. See Chapter 3 in this volume.
12 Pamela Fletcher, ‘Shopping for Art: The Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery, 1850s-90s,’ in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London: 1850–1939, ed. by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 47–84 (p. 61). See also Martha Tedeschi, ‘“Where the Picture Cannot Go, the Engravings Penetrate”: Prints and the Victorian Art Market’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 31 (2005), 8–19.
13 In 1828, gilders David Kennedy and William Lucas established the firm nine years after artist Bass Otis executed the first successful lithograph in the United States in Philadelphia in 1819.
14 A familial relationship has not been determined between Thomas J. and Joseph S. Natt.
15 ‘City Notices’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 November, p. 1, and 15 December 1849, p. 1. See also ‘The Fine Arts. The American Art Union and the International Art Union. Reprinted from the N.Y. Mirror.’ Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 October 1849, p. 1.
16 ‘A Gallery of Paintings’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 April 1849, p. 2; and ‘The Fine Arts. Choice and Beautiful Paintings’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 September 1849, p. 2.
17 See Press (Philadelphia, Pa.), 23 March 1859, p. 4; and ‘Prints, Paintings, and Looking Glasses’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 February 1833, p. 4.
18 Piggush, ‘Visualizing Early American Audiences’, 716–747 (pp. 725; 747).
19 Transactions of the Art-Union of Philadelphia for the Year 1849 (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1849), p. 69.
20 ‘Now Exhibiting at the Academy of the Fine Arts, Chestnut Street’, Public Ledger, 1 January 1849, p. 3.
21 Income figure extrapolated from United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, History of Wages in the United States From Colonial Times to 1928 (Washington, D.C: G.P.O., October 1929), p. 253, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/4067.
22 Washington’s Triumphal Entry into New York (Philadelphia: Published by William Smith, [ca. 1863]). Library Company of Philadelphia.
23 The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was adopted in 1886. http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/summary_berne.html. The United States did not sign the International Copyright Act until 1891.
24 This marketing technique aligns with ones employed by the post-revolutionary Paris art dealers explored by Steven R. Adams. As examined by Adams, the dealers’ advertising methods created a narrative for an appreciation of art based on subjective factors that were tied to the personage of the artist and the ‘intuitive sensibilities of the consumer’. ‘Noising Things abroad”: Art, Commodity, and Commerce in Post-Revolutionary Paris’, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Autumn 2013, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn13/adams-on-art-commodity-and-commerce-in-post-revolutionary-paris.
25 See Shearjashub Spooner, An Appeal to the People of The United States, on Behalf of Art, Artists, and the Public Weal (New York, 1854), p. 11.
26 An image of Shaw’s Travelling of Village Tinker in a private collection can be viewed at https://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=34460.
27 ‘Fine Arts’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 August 1849, p. 2.
28 Washington’s Triumphal, p. 8.
29 ‘The Court of Death’, Public Ledger, 6 January 1860, p. 2.
30 Percentage extrapolated from figures listed in Demographics of Philadelphia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Philadelphia and History of African Americans in Philadelphia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_African_Americans_in_Philadelphia.
31 See James S. Earle & Son’s Great Spring Sale of Oil Paintings. Catalogue of the Most Extensive and Highest Class Collections of Oil Paintings, Watercolor Drawings, Etc. (Philadelphia: Earle’s Galleries, 1859), https://archive.org/details/collectionofoilp00jame/page/4/mode/2up. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Auction advertised in Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 March 1859, p. 3. Josephine Cobb, ‘The Washington Art Association: An Exhibition Record, 1856–1860’, in Records of the Columbia Historical Society 63/65, ed. by Francis Coleman Rosenberger (Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of Washington D.C., 1966), 122–190 (p. 165).
32 Williams, Stevens, Williams & Co.’s admission fee was twenty-five cents between the hours 8:30AM and 6:30PM, October-November 1857. Evening Post, 26 October 1857, p. 3; ‘The Horse Fair Shortly to Close’, New York Daily Tribune, 7 November 1857, p. 2; ‘The Last Day’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 April 1858, p. 2; and ‘New Engravings’, Press, 13 May 1859, p. 3.
33 For histories of art unions in the US, including their cultural relevance, see Jane Aldrich Dowling Adams, A Study of Art Unions in the United State of America in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University, MA. Thesis, 1990). For the AAU specifically, recent scholarship includes Kimberly Orcutt, with Allan McLeod, ‘Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School,’ Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 18 (2019), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.1.14; Patricia Hills et al., Perfectly American: The Art-Union and Its Artists (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2011); and Joy Sperling, ‘“Art, Cheap and Good:” The Art Union in England and the United States, 1840–60’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 1 (2002), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring02/196--qart-cheap-and-goodq-the-art-union-in-england-and-the-united-states-184060.
34 Dozens of men sat on the AAU Committee of Management over the Union’s life span, and also included physician John W. Francis; lawyer William L. Morris; type founder George Bruce; and banker Francis W. Edmonds. See Jane Adams, pp. 110–113; and Sperling, ‘Art, Cheap and Good’.
35 Jane Adams, pp. 21–27, 116–118; and ‘Art Union of Philadelphia’, North American, 7 June 1847, p. 2.
36 Jane Adams, p. 23
37 The plan of the AAU published in 1840s-1850s editions of the Transactions and then Bulletin of the Union regularly included the statement ‘The plates and copyright of all engravings and all other publications belong to the institution and are used solely for its benefit’.
38 Transactions of the Art-Union of Philadelphia for the year 1848 (Philadelphia: Printed by Griggs & Adams, 1848), p. 44.
39 When a copyright statement was included on the prints, it could be in the name of the Union or the owner of the painting after which the print was based.
40 ‘Picture Frames by Machinery. (From the Art Union)’, Evening Post, 16 February 1847, p. 1.
41 Ibid.
42 See Joanna Cohen, Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) for an in-depth cultural examination of the American civic-consumer in the antebellum period. Cohen asserts that the concept and practices of the antebellum consumer formed from an economy of a collective imaginary as much as from a political one.
43 See ‘Looking glasses, etc.’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 March 1834, p. 4; ‘American Art-Union’, 8 December 1849, p. 1; and Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 June 1851, p. 2.
44 ‘City Notices’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 August, 1849, p. 1.
45 The International Art Union, with support from New York cultural figures such as Washington Irving, formed in 1848 as a veiled commercial enterprise of the French publishing firm Goupil, Vibert & Co. See Jane Adams, pp. 62–64. Newspapers stoked the rivalry with articles about which Union deserved a subscriber’s patronage and comparisons between and criticisms of their ideological and economical missions and motives. See for example, ‘The Fine Arts. The Two Unions at Loggerheads’, Herald, 15 October 1849, p. 3.
46 ‘Art Union of Philadelphia’, North American, 7 June 1847, p. 2. AUP followed the self-selection model of the London Art Union. See Jane Adams, p. 23; and Sperling, ‘Art, Cheap and Good’.
47 Transactions of the Art-Union of Philadelphia for the year 1849 (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1849), p. 30.
48 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Joseph Sill Diaries, 13, 20, 23, 25 November 1848; 1, 26, 29 December 1848; and 8, 17, 20, 25, 29 January 1849; Philadelphia Art-Union Reporter, 1 (1851), 96; and Philadelphia Art-Union Reporter, 1 (1852), 147.
49 ‘American Art Union’, North American, 2 September 1848, p. 2.
50 Art-Union Reporter, 1 (1851), 32; Sill Diaries, 19 June 1847; ‘The Fine Arts in Scotland.,’ Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 January 1855, p. 2 and ‘London Art Union’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 March 1857, p. 2.
51 Art-Union Reporter, 1 (1851), 109.
52 ‘City Notices’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 December 1849, p.1; ‘Removal’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 1 November 1849, p.1; and Sartain’s Union Magazine, 9 (1851), 156–157.
53 J. J. Mapes, ‘From Sartains Magazine for March. “Usefulness of the Arts of Design”’, Philadelphia Art Union Reporter, 1 (1851), 27–28.
54 ‘Art Unions’, The American Art Journal, 5 (1866), 88.
55 ‘New Engravings’, Press, 29 April 1859, p. 3.
56 An image of August Charles Lemoine’s engraving after Winterhalter’s Florinde in the collections of the British Museum is viewable at https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=373589001&objectId=1615012&partId=1.
57 Springfield Republican, 30 May 1857. p.1; On Exhibition at Williams & Everett’s, No. 234 Washington Street, Boston, the Original Painting of Florinde, by Winterhalter (Exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts, 1852.) Admission 25 cents. (Boston, [ca. 1857]), https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.06101500/?sp=2. Library of Congress; New York Tribune, 9 September 1857, p. 1. ‘Winterhalter’s “Florinde,”’ Boston Traveler, 11 November 1858, p. 2.
58 Smith entered the frame-making business three years after the auction of the holdings of the AAU in 1852. Given available evidence, a conclusion has been made that the prints were most likely restrikes from plates in Smith’s possession, rather than print remainders. Plate sizes of the AAU prints and framing sizes noted in the Smith catalog were compared in forming this conclusion. The question of how he came to hold the AAU printing plates remains unanswered. The same conclusion has been made for the CAA plates and prints. His method of acquisition of the plates of the CAA which dissolved in 1861 is also uncertain. These conclusions were also informed by bibliographic notes accompanying Smith prints like the following in the online catalog of the American Antiquarian Society which states ‘William Smith acquired Cornelius Tiebout’s plates and re-struck them’.
59 ‘The Subject of the picture is of homely, but of universal interest; one that will appeal to all hearts, and to all understandings, and will require no labelling to make it perfectly understood’. Transactions of the American Art Union (1844), p. 9. A copy of the print with Smith’s imprint has not been located.
60 See Lauren B. Hewes, ‘“Dedicated to the lovers of art and literature,” The Cosmopolitan Art Association Engravings, 1856–1861’, Imprint, 31 (2006), 2–17 for a concise, cogent overview of the history and practices of the Association, as well as its relationship with Williams, Stevens, & Williams.
61 Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 3 (1858), 67. The fee for the transfer of copyright was not indicated. For context, in 1857 Williams paid two thousand dollars for the painting and three thousand dollars for the copyright of Frederick Edwin Church’s Falls of Niagara. Springfield Republican 30 May 1857, p. 1.
62 Ibid.
63 Extant Smith prints listed in the circa-1863 catalog are not prevalent in public collections. Deductions were derived from surveys of select, pre-1865 prints in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, with William Smith imprints and/ or prints with titles and similar sizes listed in Smith’s circa-1863 catalog. Review of microfilm of Pennsylvania — Eastern District registration records (Reel 67–70) between January 2, 1854 and November 8, 1864 revealed no deposits by William Smith, nor was he included in the indexes. Consequently, material evidence of Smith as a ‘registered’ copyright holder is elusive and reasonable deductions are made.
64 The warning message read: ‘Caution — A badly executed copy has been thrown out upon the public, which does not in the least convey the BEAUTIFUL IDEA which is carried out in this great work of art published by G.T. Perry, duly copyrighted &c &c and which contains over ONE HUNDRED more figures…’ Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, 8 February 1862, p. 3.
65 As explored by Isabella Alexander, public interest holds a compelling role in the understanding of copyright. Alexander argues that the ‘notion of a “public interest” which diverges from the interests of authors, even if not always opposed to them has had a significant and rhetorical and discursive impact in shaping the law of copyright’. Isabella Alexander, Copyright Law and the Public Interest (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2010), p. 4.
66 United States Copyright Office (USCO), entry dated 15 December, 1860; and entry dated 31 December, 1860, Copyright Records, Pennsylvania Eastern District, May 14, 1860-May, 16, 1861, vol. 283, reel 68. A familial relationship between William and John has not been established. A registration in John Smith’s name was not located.
67 Copies of Triumphal with William Smith’s imprint and without Perry’s statement of copyright have not been located.