Connections and Acquaintances

Part of the fun of collecting antique prints is that you start to run into familiar people. This shouldn't be too surprising. If you concentrate on certain kinds of prints (I like scenes of cities on the water, whether river-cities or port cities) from a certain era (like the 19th century), this limits the field quite a bit, and you're bound to encounter artists whose work you already know.

The same thing happens off the printed page as well. Print fanciers and collectors make up a pretty small part of the population, and you can't help but make connections, particularly if you live in a city like St. Louis, which, its 2.7 million-strong population aside, can sometimes act more like a small town than a major metropolitan area.

One of my favorite recent acquaintances is a woman named Tina Crist, whose business, Art and Frame Restoration on Watson Road in St. Louis, is only a ten-minute drive from my house. I had some pieces which were badly in need of restoration, found her website, and read that she'd worked with the late Sidney Larson, who had restored the Thomas Hart Benton murals in Missouri's state capitol in Jefferson City.

That was good enough for me, because I'd known Sid Larson as a child. Sid was a good friend of my grandfather, who was close to Thomas Hart Benton himself. Grandpa, in contract to my low-down, dilettantish ways, was a serious art collector. In addition to lots and lots of Bentons, he also collected the work of the great St. Louis-born cowboy artist, Charlie Russell, as well as George Caleb Bingham, Oscar Berninghaus, John Sloan, and any number of other American regionalists and Western artists, and he'd gotten to know Sid through their involvement in the art world. The fact that Tina had worked with Sid Larson was a pretty good recommendation. Connection Number One.

Tina is a bubbly, voluble woman whose enthusiasm for her work is endearing and infectious. She insisted that I tour her facility, take a look at what she was working on and how she did it, and then sit down and talk and talk and talk about prints, printmaking, and art in general. I was happy to do it, and happy to leave my prints in her care. She does great work.

Not long after I met her, she texted me a photo of three small prints.

"A gentleman I know has these, and he's looking to move them along," she said. "They're lower end, but I thought you might like them, since they came from a book. You can see the binding stitch-holes at the base. Why don't you give him a call?"

So there was Connection Number Two--a friend of a friend.

Finden's engraving of Yarmouth, after Bartlett's sketch. 

When I looked up "W. Westall, ARA," I got excited. They were indeed from a book: The Landscape Album, Or Great Britain Illustrated: A Series of Original Views, from Drawings by William Westall, ARA, Engraved By, and Under the Direction Of, Edward Finden With Descriptions By Thomas Moule (Charles Tilt, Fleet Street, 1830).

Part of the fun of collecting antique prints is the names of the books from which they often come.

What excited me most was that I knew who both Edward Finden and Thomas Moule were. In fact, I already had pieces by both of them in my collection.

Another connection.

Edward Finden (1791-1857) was one of the most prolific British engravers of the first half of the 19th century, as well as one of the most respected, as shown by his directorship of Great Britain Illustrated. He had worked on many other books as well, including Finden's Views of the Ports, Harbours, Watering Places, and Coastal Scenery of Great Britain (1840, Geo. Virtue). Finden's engravings for that book were based on original sketches by none other than William Henry Bartlett, whom we've met in an earlier post and whom we'll encounter again. And I'd bought one of the steel engravings from that book years earlier: "Great Yarmouth, Norfolk."

Thomas Moule (1784-1851), who wrote the descriptions of Finden's and Westall's scenes, was an English antiquarian, postal inspector, and mapmaker and no slouch at engraving himself. He was also a big fan of heraldry, and liked to festoon his maps with the crests of all the towns and cities in the region he was mapping. And, by a strange coincidence, I'd bought one of his maps just a few weeks before--this one, as a matter of fact. "Dorsetshire," which had first appeared in Barclay's Complete and Universal English Dictionary (1840, published by the same George Virtue who'd published Finden's Views and other books which I have pieces of).

Interestingly, the book was reissued after the railroads had been built, so Moule just pulled out his old plates and scratched the railroad lines into the matrices. The one I have is one of the later ones with the railroad--it's that thick black line curving over the right-hand side of the map.

And it turns out that one of Thomas Moule's descendants is a Facebook friend of mine. Yet another connection.

With this swirling maelstrom of connections, I felt like I really didn't have any choice. I called Tina's acquaintance and bought his three prints that same evening. And, all the connections aside, I'm glad I did, because they're really lovely little pieces. Here's Canterbury:



...and here's St. John's College, Cambridge:



...and here's Salford, my favorite of the three, since it has a river in it:

Funny chain of coincidences and connections, in both the 19th century and the 21st. But that's part of the fun of collecting antique maps and prints. You never know who you're going to run into next... and you may well already know them.