Description

207. David Rousar, Images of Iron Makers’ Pride, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn 2008), 2-18.
As the United States expanded into the Old Northwest in the 1840s and 1850s, railway building reached a fever pitch. The demand for industrial products, particularly locomotives, gave rise to a spectacular form of advertising that not only described the product offered but also showed the pride of the builders in their company’s technological achievements The result was the creation of a body of large folio, often vividly-colored lithographic cards depicting the best designs in locomotive technology.

The prints were commissioned by large firms such as M. W. Baldwin, Richard Norris and Son, and Boston Locomotive Works, as well as obscure companies like Denmead and Son and Virginia Locomotive and Car Mfg. Co. And some can be directly associated with prominent names in the field, such as Zerah Colburn, Walter McQueen, and Thatcher Perkins. As railway development reached its zenith in the mid 1850s, it created the conditions that gave rise to the “golden age” of locomotive builders’ lithographs. When the economic boom diminished, so did the production of the large format prints, which were replaced by photographs.

208. Nat Case, John Bachmann and the American Birds Eye View Print, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn 2008), 19-35.

John Bachmann was born in Switzerland around 1814 and died in Jersey City, New Jersey around 1894. John Reps writes, “No finer artist of city views worked in America”; indeed, Bachmann’s bird’s eye views are unique in the history of American views for their combination of artistic technique inherited from European landscape drawing, in which he was trained and worked in Paris, and his experimental sensibility in constructing his views from vantage points he had never seen. His career saw the transition from one-color stone lithography through multiple-tint-stone techniques into zinc chromolithography, and from printed views as decoration and commemoration to views as promotional and speculative documents. His views reflect not only the changing landscape of New York City and the other cities he drew, including New Orleans and Boston, but the changing landscape of the American print world.

209. James Brust, Notes on the Life of James Merritt Ives with a Reappraisal of When He Joined Nathaniel Currier, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn, 2008), 36-41.
Even though Currier & Ives remains a well-known term, even today, surprisingly little has been written about the firm’s junior partner, James Merritt Ives (1824-1895). In this article, the author combines his research about Ives with newly found family material, including a number of previously unknown photographs of Ives and his family, to present a clearer picture of the man behind the name. Genealogical data is presented, along with a list of all of James Merritt Ives’ children. Ives’ Civil war service and his community involvement are discussed. And finally, there is a reappraisal of the date that James Merritt Ives first joined Nathaniel Currier, which appears to be earlier than previously thought.