she-philosopher.com: Gallery exhibit (Color Printing in 1888, 1 of 3)

original issue as a TEMPORARY FILE — WORK IN PROGRESS © April 2006
reissued Gallery Exhibit © November 2006; revised 19 February 2007

Reproduction only for non-commercial use.

Gallery Exhibit, Catalog Nos. 78 & 79

EXHIBIT 1 of 3
Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, 1888

Title page for 1888 volume of journal

Edited by Johannes Diederich Eduard Schmeltz (1839-1909).

Published in Leiden, and printed by Pieter Willem Marinus Trap.
(Later volumes of the journal, from the 1890s through 1968, were published by Brill.)

248 pp. with 21 color plates. (While the title page states that there are 22 plates — “Mit 22 Tafeln und mehreren Textillustrationen” — there is no Plate XVII in the copy of the journal I worked from.)

View an enlarged 1000 x 1259 pixel GIF image (52KB)

THIS THREE-PART GALLERY EXHIBIT is a companion piece to the Gallery exhibit on Powhatan’s deerskin mantle with shell map (ca. 1608), and questions the origins of the 19th-century image of Powhatan’s cloak featured in that exhibit (Gallery Catalog No. 63) — is it really a color photograph, printed in 1888? or something else?

The findings presented here are the results of a collaborative research project conducted online during the month of April 2006. At that time, I hastily compiled and posted three HTML pages, designated “Temporary File — Work in Progress,” so that members of two online discussion lists (InfoDesign-Café and MapHist) could access and scrutinize the images under discussion. Now that we have our answers to my opening set of questions, I have revised and reissued the original pages posted in April 2006. The new pages (especially this Exhibit 1 of 3) document the group’s process of discovery regarding a fascinating, if somewhat neglected, specialty in the history of technical illustration.

As usual, I owe thanks to those members of the InfoDesign-Café list who have, for several years now, cheerfully supported me in my various research projects — no matter how obscure the subject, or how tedious my presentation of the issues. Several of their voices will appear in the write-up that follows. I also wish to thank those members of the MapHist list who have more recently welcomed me into their online community. This completes one of several projects for which they have been waiting patiently.

An 1888 Example of Color Photography?

In March 2006 I was contacted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) about possible use of my image of Powhatan’s Mantle (she-philosopher.com Gallery Catalog No. 63) in one of their exhibitions.

Plate XX (facing page 216)
Powhatan’s Mantle
(unedited image scanned at 300 dpi; no color correction)

Illustration for “Notes on Powhatan’s Mantle, Preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford” by Edward B. Tylor, Oxford. Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie 1 (1888): 215–17.

Attribution:
“E. T. Shelton phot. in ashmolean museum”

Notes:
This is a low-resolution JPG version of a TIFF file scanned at 300 dpi. For multiple versions of the edited image, Gallery Cat. No. 63, see the she-philosopher.com GALLERY exhibit, “Powhatan’s Deerskin Mantle with Shell Map, ca. 1608.” This related gallery exhibit includes two alternative pictures of Powhatan’s mantle (a black-and-white photograph printed in 1907 and a drawing printed in 1989).

The Museum required a proper credit line for the image, and it was when I first tried to come up with one that I realized I had more questions than answers about the 1888 graphic.

The image comes from the first volume of a journal titled Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, printed in Leiden in 1888 by the distinguished firm of P. W. M. Trap. Volume 1 of the journal includes 21 exquisite color plates, of which this image of Powhatan’s cloak is Plate XX. Its attribution

E. T. Shelton phot. in ashmolean museum

is unique. All other color plates in the 1888 volume of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie are attributed to one of four sources:

• ex coll. Mus. Ethnogr. Lugd. Bat.
• ex coll. Mus. Ethnogr. Berolinensis
• ex coll. auct.
• Auctor del.

making Plate XX the only image with lettering describing it as a photograph.

Attributions for Plate XX (facing pg. 216)
On the LEFT: E. T. Shelton phot. in ashmolean museum.
On the RIGHT: P. W. M. Trap exc.

Attributions for Plate III (facing pg. 22)
On the LEFT: ex coll. Mus. Ethnogr. Lugd. Bat.
On the RIGHT: P. W. M. Trap exc.

Attributions for Plate VIa (facing pg. 96)
On the LEFT: ex coll. Mus. Ethnogr. Berolinensis.
On the RIGHT: P. W. M. Trap exc.

Attributions for Plate XII (facing pg. 148)
On the LEFT: ex coll. auct.
On the RIGHT: P. W. M. Trap exc.

Attributions for Plate XVI (facing pg. 188)
On the LEFT: Auctor del.
On the RIGHT: P. W. M. Trap exc.

This attribution of Plate XX to the photographer E. T. Shelton is further confirmed in the accompanying text by Dr. Edward B. Tylor, whose article opens:

Among specimens illustrative of native North-American arts, as yet untouched by European influence, is the Deerskin Mantle ornamented with Shell-work, recorded to have belonged to the Virginian Chief, Powhatan. This interesting object has never been properly figured, so that it seemed to me desirable that a careful copy should be published in the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, with the necessary authentication and description. The Keeper of the Ashmolean, Mr. Arthur J. Evans, has kindly enabled me to have it photographed, and to transcribe the documents relating to it.

(Tylor, “Notes on Powhatan’s Mantle” 215–6)

Nonetheless, there were several things about the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie’s Plate XX which caused me to question its description as a color photograph.

For one thing, the print is still (after all these years) simply gorgeous. The colors are especially rich, giving just the right tonal quality to the aged leather of the cloak. Indeed, the image looks so real that I just want to reach out and touch it. I couldn’t help but feel that this aesthetic effect was well beyond what color photography was capable of in the late 1880s.

Second, the colors, texture and sumptuous realism of Plate XX is of a kind with all the other plates in the 1888 journal volume, none of which are labeled as photographs.

Third, there’s the commentary of another scholar, David Bushnell, who in 1907 published his own black-and-white photograph of Powhatan’s mantle (she-philosopher.com Gallery Catalog No. 63a), accompanied by the curious remark:

“Pohatan’s habit” ... has already been figured and described by Dr E. B. Tylor, but in the colored plate much of the detail is lost which shows to better advantage in a direct photograph.

(Bushnell, “Virginia — from Early Records” 39)

which I took to mean that Plate XX in volume 1 of the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie was probably not “a direct photograph” after all.

And finally, in trying to figure out why Bushnell thought his black-and-white image offered better documentary evidence than the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie’s colored plate, I noticed significant discrepancies between the two reproductions. About halfway down the left edge of the cloak there is a section of deerskin and beadwork missing from the fourth spirally-formed roundlet in the 1888 color image (Plate XX); yet, in the 1907 photo (Bushnell’s Plate V), not only is the spiral shape of the beadwork somewhat different at top and bottom, but there are more beads and deerskin on the left side of the roundlet.

Detail of area around 4th roundlet (from top) on left side of the deerskin cloak.
From the image printed in 1888 (Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, Plate XX).

Detail of area around 4th roundlet (from top) on left side of the deerskin cloak.
From the image printed in 1907 (David Bushnell’s Plate V).

Given that Bushnell complained in his 1907 article that Powhatan’s cloak (along with other Virginia Indian artefacts held by the Ashmolean) was noticeably deteriorating, I thought it curious that Bushnell’s photo, taken almost 20 years after Shelton’s, could show pieces of the cloak that were missing in 1888.

All of these curiosities can be explained, however, if the 1888 plate is, as Gunnar Swanson of the InfoDesign-Café list first put it to me, “hand-lithography copied after a photo rather than photography per se.”

And Gunnar’s initial assessment was correct. It turns out that the Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie image of Powhatan’s mantle is not a photograph, but a lithograph, executed by the journal’s printer, P. W. M. Trap, after the original photo (presumably in black-and-white) by E. T. Shelton.

Thus began my exploration of 19th-century lithography, as used to document the topography and ethnography of foreign lands, including rare artifacts in the collections of museums and private individuals. Not only did the printing house of Pieter Willem Marinus Trap excel at this kind of technical illustration — his lithography was featured in all the lavishly-produced early volumes of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie — but we find high-quality color lithographic reproductions in other scholarly work of the period, such as William Griggs’ richly-illustrated Indian Art at Marlborough House and Sandringham: Illustrated in Collotype, and Photo-Chromo-Lithography (London, 1892).

John Bastin and Bea Brommer have noted that the medium of lithography “was relatively late in being adapted for general use in the Netherlands.” The early 19th century was “a time when the English colour plate book, illustrated by the medium of aquatint, was enjoying its greatest vogue,” and the most spectacular plates, especially in books concerned with travel and topography, were printed in Britain. It wasn’t until the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s that finely illustrated books became the Dutch standard. But “from an aesthetic, scientific and technical point of view,” such books as were published by the Dutch during this period, particularly in the field of natural history, “have never been surpassed.” (Bastin & Brommer 2)

In the 1840s,

lithographic printing in the Netherlands entered a new phase both with regard to technical change and the increase in the number of lithographic printing works. By 1840 there were no less than thirty-nine such establishments, six in both Rotterdam and The Hague, four in Amsterdam, three in Groningen, two in each of Utrecht, Zwolle, Leiden, Haarlem, Leeuwarden and Gorinchem, and one in Breda, Dordrecht, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Middelburg, Deventer, Nijmegen, Zutfen and Sneek. The older established firms of C. A. Spin & Zoon and Desguerrois & Co., Amsterdam, J. P. Houtman, Utrecht, J. J. Steuerwald, The Hague, and H. J. Backer, Dordrecht, were now joined by the establishments of 0. D. Emrik, Haarlem, E. Spanier, The Hague, and, of particular importance for lithograph prints of Indonesia, Tresling & Co., Amsterdam, P. W. M. Trap, Leiden, and C. W. Mieling, The Hague. At the same time, monochrome lithographs coloured by hand were giving way to tinted lithographs, initially printed with a single buff background tint, and chromolithographs, printed from three or more stones.

(Bastin & Brommer, Nineteenth Century
Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia 25)

The growth in the number of lithographic printing works in the Netherlands during the next two decades (1840–60) was not so rapid, but there was a remarkable increase in the number of these establishments during the 1860s and 1870s, the number in 1879 being 116....

(Bastin & Brommer 162n402)

P. W. M. Trap of Leiden would go on to become one of “the premier lithographic establishments of the Netherlands in their heyday” (Bastin & Brommer 162n401).

Pieter Willem Marinus Trap, one of the best known of nineteenth century Dutch lithographic printers, and one of the most prolific printers of lithographic plates of Indonesia, was born in Leiden on 20 April 1821. He lived and worked in Leiden during his whole life as an artist, lithographer, printer and publisher, and died there on 20 October 1905.

(Bastin & Brommer 163n404)

Among his many achievements, in 1856 P. W. M. Trap lithographed what may well have been “the first caricature of Dutch colonial society in Indonesia.”

As glossed by Bastin & Brommer,
Nineteenth Century Prints
and Illustrated Books of
Indonesia (1979):

“Sijthoff also published another chromolithograph plate after a drawing by Hardouin as the frontispiece of a booklet by W. L. Ritter entitled De Europeaan in Nederlandsche Indië (Leiden, 1856). The plate is by P. W. M. Trap, Leiden, one of the most prolific of nineteenth century lithographers of Indonesian subjects, and depicts an obese Dutchman smoking a cheroot, with Indonesian figures and the buildings of Batavia in the background. It has all the humourous elements that one expects in a Hardouin drawing, the original of which is in the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden. Of all the plates after Hardouin’s drawings this comes closest to caricature, and it may well reflect a certain bitterness on the part of an impoverished artist viewing the high colonial life around him. Apart, possibly, from one or two elements in the drawings of Johannes Rach, caricature of colonial society is entirely absent from Western art of Indonesia down to the middle years of the nineteenth century, and only really begins with the drawings of A. G. van Rijk and Charles Theodore Deeleman during the 1850s and 1860s. The Hardouin plate has therefore every right to be considered the first caricature of Dutch colonial society in Indonesia with the possible exception of the anonymous plate depicting a similar subject dressed in sarong and kebaya in Warnasarie, 1854.”

“De Europeaan in Nederlandsch Indië.” Chromolithograph (19.5 x 11.8 cm) by P. W. M. Trap, after original watercolor drawing by Ernest Hardouin.
From W. L. Ritter’s De Europeaan in Nederlandsche Indië (Leiden, 1856).
Repr. as Fig. 71 (p. 78) in Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia, by John Bastin and Bea Brommer.

View an enlarged 530 x 932 pixel JPG image (117KB)

By 1888, when P. W. M. Trap lithographed all 21 plates for the first volume of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, he had considerable experience both with the subject matter of the journal (mostly Indonesian ethnography and topography) and with lithography as a medium of illustration. He had moved on from tinted lithographs colored by hand — as we find in the children’s book on Indonesia, De Reis naar Java; Verhaal voor de Jeugd, by Evangeline (pseudonym of H. M. C. van Oosterzee), printed by P. W. M. Trap in 1858 for the publisher A. W. Sijthoff — to “excellent” chromolithograph plates after photographs and drawings, as we find in the Ethnographische Atlas (Leiden, 1882), part of the nine-part Midden-Sumatra documenting the results of the Sumatra Expedition of 1877–79 (sponsored by the Nederlandse Aardrijkskundig Genootschap). In the multiple volumes of Midden-Sumatra, published for E. J. Brill in 1882–92,

mechanical printing processes dominated book illustration, throwing into sharp relief the relatively short period when coloured aquatints and lithographs constituted the principal media of illustration.

(Bastin & Brommer 47)

Insofar as the Midden-Sumatra

contains woodcut engravings, tinted and chromolithographs, as well as etchings, after both drawings and photographs, the work affords an interesting example of virtually all types of book illustration in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

(Bastin & Brommer 47)

It was to show off the unsurpassed beauty of 19th-century lithographic illustration, and to establish the generic look-and-feel of P. W. M. Trap’s lithograph plates — Plate XX, included — that I originally posted digital reproductions of all 21 plates from vol. 1 of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie (see links to Exhibits 2 of 3 and 3 of 3 towards the bottom of this page). Unfortunately, online viewing can not do justice to the extraordinary colors produced with lithography, but the electronic images do give an idea of what masters such as P. W. M. Trap were able to accomplish in this medium. Randal Hunting, a colleague on the InfoDesign-Café list, put it well during our subsequent online discussion of lithographic art posters:

Lithographic reproduction never ceases to amaze me. Until quite late in the 20th century, when you are looking at a lithographic poster — be it Toulouse-lautrec or Cassandre, you are not looking at lines drawn by the artist but rather at an incredibly skillful hand color separation onto individual (often 6 to 8) lithograph stones.

(Randal Hunting, 19 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

One of the saddest things to see in poster art is the slow replacement of lithographic work with halftone work in the 30’s and 40’s which is very much inferior. I can understand perhaps why Cassandre committed suicide in the 60’s. Only now with hexachrome inks and stochastic printing is color reproduction really getting back to nearly the quality of what you could get in the heyday of “craftsman-based” color printing.

(Randal Hunting, 24 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

Lithographic Technology

For those who are interested in learning more about the artistry and complexities of printing with stone plates, I would recommend several resources discovered or produced by list members during the course of our online discussion of a range of related subjects. (Links to these are given in the “Related Links” section at the bottom of this page.)

The best starting point is probably the Wikipedia article on lithography. It describes how lithography has been used to print information (e.g., maps) as well as art (posters, especially, although some maps would fall into this category, too). At the bottom of the Wikipedia page, there is a link to the Museum of Modern Art’s “What is a Print?” page, with Flash demos which show the print-making processes of lithography, woodcut, and etching.

There are also links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page on lithography for online museum exhibits of Delacroix and Goya lithographs, and for pictures in the Wikimedia Commons showing actual stone plates and lithographic printing presses. Included here are two pictures of the substantial

Archive of the Landesamt für Vermessung und Geoinformation, containing a couple of h[u]ndred tons of stone lit[h]ography plates with maps of Bavaria.

which give a feel for just what’s involved in printing with stone plates.

This relates to a comment by Conrad Taylor, also of the InfoDesign-Café list, who explained to the group that

Among the earliest uses of lithographic printing was by the Napoleonic armies, which had mobile cartographic printshops for turning out maps for field commanders. After the War, in Britain, the War Office adopted lithography not only for maps, but also for recruiting posters. It was then taken up as a print method for music, and for various kinds of jobbing print, so that by 1859 the firm of Waterlow’s could claim to have sold two thousand small lithographic presses.

(Conrad Taylor, 21 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

Given our own modern preference for portable printing systems with ever smaller footprints, I couldn’t help but wonder just how mobile these 19th-century “mobile cartographic printshops” really were. In addition to the lithographic press, the printer would have needed to transport all the (fairly large and heavy) stone plates for every printed piece — one stone plate for each color used, with the average piece of artwork requiring 6 to 8 stone plates.

Gunnar responded to this set of queries by introducing a needed historical perspective on military logistics:

Deborah wondered about the mobility of “mobile” printers carrying around large stones but mobility is relative. It would be almost half a century until war photographers would bring mobile darkrooms in the form of horse drawn wagons into war zones. They would then coat glass in a highly explosive atmosphere, load their cameras, step out to make a photo, and return to the highly explosive big target darkroom before the plate could dry.
Napoleon, in addition to lithographic stone lugging, was a pioneer of logistics. His army’s movement of food (especially canned food) was one of the factors that allowed modern mass army-warfare. Now we discuss tanks in terms of how many can fit in an airplane and whether they can be air dropped if no landing strip is available and canvas-roofed cities appear in short order but some of the tales of military transport in the past have more in common with Herzog and his crew’s frostbitten slog off Anapurna than with our notion of battle.

(Gunnar Swanson, 27 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

In the process of teaching me how to identify a lithographic print, Conrad usefully pointed out that

You shouldn’t use you[r] experience of modern CMYK colour as a mental “lens” through which to understand this kind of 19th-century colour printing.
We are used to the idea of “process colour”, in which varying dot sizes of a very small number of colours are mixed on the paper to fool our eyes into seeing a wide range of colours. But 19th-C chromolithography might be better imagined as a mechanical equivalent of painting a poster with coloured inks. If you want orange on the page, you paint it with orange inks — you don’t stipple a magenta pattern on top of yellow. So, if you want 15 colours, you use 15 inks and 15 stones.
In fact it gets a bit more subtle than this. An artist may indeed prepare a set of lithographic stones so that some of the colouring and shading effects are produced as the result of overlays of one colour on another, and it need not be a solid on another solid, because one of the colours might be drawn on the stone as a stipple, or hatch, or cross-hatch. To the artist, the most predictable of these effects would be the effects of shade-stippling using the black printer only, but more adventurous artists might, for example, play with stippling blue over a green solid.

(Conrad Taylor, 24 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

And Randal, whose initial assessment of Plate XX read

This is almost definitely a hand-reproduced color lithograph made from the photograph (and probably with personal reference to the object for color comparison). As Mark notes the incredibly accurate hand reproduction of lithographic images was quite common in the 19th century, and getting quite reasonably cheap by the 1880’s. It is possible that it was reproduced by some other means (such as color intaglio, hand-colored engraving, or mechanical halftone), but the quality of the reproduction indicates to me a lithograph. If you view the original under a loupe and see a “rough” texture similar to an inkjet print, then you know it is a lithograph.
It is possible that a craftsman redrew the photograph and then reproduced that drawing as a mechanical color halftone, but this would be very early for that technique and the halftone dots would be very evident in the print under a loupe (and probably would have showed in this scan).

(Randal Hunting, 19 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

helped us identify that “‘rough’ texture similar to an inkjet print” by posting a comparison of “highly-enlarged” lithographic, traditional halftone, and inkjet prints at his HuntingDesign Web site. Randal’s accompanying comments

You will notice that the inkjet also has a “rough” quality to its gradations of color similar to the lithograph but at a much tinier dimension. In order to get this to show in a scan I had to print a photo on my Espon 2200 at 720 dpi (quite low-quality) and enlarge it enormously.

(Randal Hunting, 25 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

and

The custom colors used are one of the most alluring aspects of real lithography. As far as I’ve seen from looking at old books CMYK separations didn’t become really widespread till the 1930’s, and even then it was common to see instead RYB separations till the mid 50’s. I believe that the modern use of Magenta really began sometime in the late 50’s. But both of these color separation systems would be used only for halftone work. Almost all the real lithographic work I’ve seen uses what are essentially custom colors, though I assume that certain standardized palettes of separation colors were used.

(Randal Hunting, 24 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

answered several of my questions about the crayon-like look of a lithograph (when magnified) and the color separation process using stone tablets.

Conrad further contributed to our knowledge of production processes with his pointer to

an interesting page that I found on the website of the Queensland Government, which has a fascinating “Virtual Museum” devoted to cartography and the reproduction of maps. [This page] contains a description of the use of “dragon’s blood” as a way of transferring an image from one lithographic stone to another, which would be one way of providing a reference image for the artist/craftworker to work from.

(Conrad Taylor, 24 April 2006
post to InfoD-Cafe list)

And finally, Mark Barratt (also of the InfoD-Cafe list) suggested several books on the subject by William Ivins and Michael Twyman. I have since converted Mark’s list to a formal bibliography, and posted it in the REFERENCES area of she-philosopher.com.

In Conclusion

While I have learned a great deal about 19th-century print-making from our online discussion and subsequent research, I am still far from being able to look at an illustration in a 19th-century book or journal and identify its type and method of production. I still can’t tell the difference between an aquatint and lithograph, let alone distinguish a monochrome lithograph colored by hand from a tinted lithograph (“initially printed with a single buff background tint”) colored by hand ... from a chromolithograph (“printed from three or more stones”) ... from a photo-chromo-lithograph.

Such fine distinctions require the eyes of an expert — someone experienced at handling the different media — and I don’t expect to ever achieve such knowing vision.

But I have learned enough to confirm for myself others’ more expert judgment of the 1888 color plate picturing Powhatan’s mantle. It is, without question, not a color photograph.

But then, nothing about Plate XX in vol. 1 of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie ever made any such claim in the first place.

I know now that my initial reading of the plate’s lettering was anachronistic. It’s only because of the advancements and omnipresence of color photography today that I assume every colored photograph I see is a color photograph.

So it was I who saw the colored image labeled “E. T. Shelton phot. in ashmolean museum” and jumped to the conclusion that this meant “color photograph.”

At least we know I won’t make that mistake again. ;-)

COLOR PRINTING IN 1888 > exhibit 1 of 3 | exhibit 2 of 3 | exhibit 3 of 3