Description

210. Julie Dunn-Morton, “160 Year of Collecting: Prints at the St. Louis Mercantile Library,” Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 2 – 11.

The St. Louis Mercantile Library Association was formed in 1846 to provide an educational and cultural resource for a growing frontier city. Its founders were largely art collectors who supported the acquisition of artwork for the young institution. Included are prints of pivotal historical events and their impact on everyday life, as in Currier & Ives’ Great Fire at St. Louis . . . (1849), George Caleb Bingham’s Martial Law or Order #11(1872) and Kyra Markham’s Lockout (1937). Among the treasures of the collection are the complete set of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America (1826-1838) including rare pattern proofs and composite plates. St. Louis history and the expansion of the American West are also widely represented with works ranging from a handbill advertising the exhibition of a live buffalo at a local stable (1816) to the poignant portrait prints of McKenney & Hall’s The Indian Tribes of North America… (1836-1844). The Library continues to build its print collection, focusing on works by Missouri artists and on American Art Union prints. 

211. John Neal Hoover, “‘Mr. Heine Took a Sketch of the View…’: The Career of William Heine, Official Illustrator of the Perry Expedition to Japan and Far East,” Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 12-23.

The career of William Heine (1827-1885) typifies that of the many writer-artists accompanying the various American government-sponsored exploring expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century with one major difference: it spanned two continents whereas most of the others documented national expansion in the new territories of the American West. The German-born Heine, as senior artist for the Perry Expedition, one of the most far-reaching diplomatic missions in U.S. history, depicted, through sketches and widely-published prints, the events surrounding American activity in the Far East in 1853 and 1854—the tense negotiations, parades, ceremonies, customs, and entertainments—as well as the natural settings in which American diplomats and scientists found themselves. The expedition’s artistic output has received surprisingly scant attention considering its importance and original warm reception. Numerous prints are reproduced from the massive government reports that ensued in the late 1850s and the rare Graphic Scenes in the Japan Expedition (1856) as well as Heine’s Passing the Rubicon, lithographed by Sarony & Co.

212. Nancy Finlay, “Mary Maguire, Girl Lithographer.” Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 24-28.

Mary Maguire, who was born in Hartford about 1835, won a gold medal for drawing on stone at the Hartford County Agricultural Fair in 1851. This article includes reproductions of Mary’s two known lithographs, Christ Church, Hartford, Conn. and Rev. Thomas Robbins, D.D. Librarian of The Connecticut Historical Society, and places them in the context of contemporary developments in lithography in Hartford. Mary also exhibited her artwork at the National Academy in New York and the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1858, she moved to Baltimore to take charge of art instruction at the Maryland Institute and opened her own art school a few years later. She died there in 1900.