Travelogues, Part 1.

The excellent Christopher Lane, one of the proprietors of the Philadelphia Print Shop, makes a very useful distinction on his very helpful blog between "collectors" and "acquirers."

"A collector," he says, "can be distinguished from an acquirer by the approach he or she takes to collecting... The most important collecting criterion is that of a theme or topic for the collection. The theme of a collection is that characteristic which the prints share that turns the assemblage into a single entity, rather than simply a group of prints."

At this point, although it pains me to say it, I'm really more of an acquirer than a collector. The criteria I use to select the prints I buy are so broad that it's difficult to say that I have a collecting focus at all. But if I have one at all, it's the travelogue.

I mentioned in the first post on this blog that I wanted to find images that were evocative or redolent of certain themes: travel, exploration, adventure, discovery. This does limit the scope of what I buy somewhat. Portraits are out, so are botanicals, and so are fashion prints, like those damned ubiquitous "La Mode Illustree" engravings that infest most of the antique shops I frequent like pantry moths. And I could care less about most historical scenes, like battles and stuff like that.

I like, and buy when I see them, images that were created by travelers, by people who went out to see what they could see and then recorded what they saw for thousands of other people to see them as well. The images they created, and the books in which these prints were published, were the National Geographic and the Discovery Channel of their time. In an age when people didn't move around a lot, and when it wasn't uncommon to be born, live, and die within the very limited radius of a couple of miles, books and images like this were their only glimpse of distant places.

One of the most interesting of these books was American Scenery, or Land Lake and River: Illustrations of a Transatlantic Nature, which was published in 1840 in London by the firm of Geo. Virtue & Co. (Virtue, as a short aside, was one heck of a publisher. The firm published tons of books and prints on precisely the topic I like.) Originally published serially (there were 30 issues altogether), the series was eventually collected and published in two volumes, with 119 engravings.

American Scenery was illustrated by William H. Bartlett, whom we've encountered before in a previous post, and written by Nathaniel Parker Willis. A team of engravers created the matrices from Bartlett's sketches and paintings--one of whom was Henry Adlard, about whom I'll say more later.

America in the 1830s and 1840s was still a romantic and largely unknown place, and fascinating to Britons and other Europeans. It was still a frontier country, there was a lot to be explored, and Americans were hard at work building not only a new country but a new culture. It was, in short, a great place for a guy like William Bartlett.

Bartlett didn't live very long--from 1809 to 1854--but he packed a lot of living into his short life. He was a terrific artist and an indefatigable traveler who traveled widely through the Middle East, the Balkans,  and North America (American Scenery was followed up by Canadian Scenery Illustrated), making four visits to North American to show the folks back home what their American cousins were up to, and where they were up to it.

So far, I've been able to find two of the 119 Bartlett engravings from American Scenery. Here's the first one I picked up: "Village of Sing Sing (Hudson River)."

And here's the second one: "View of Baltimore."

Sharp-eyed observers will notice that one's in color, one isn't. This isn't uncommon in the world of antique print-collecting--prints were the adult coloring books of their day, and very often, when the books were broken up so that the prints could be sold separately, the dealers had them colored to enhance their decorative value and salability.

William Bartlett died of fever while returning from the Middle East in 1854. I find him one of the most inspiring and interesting artists in my assemblage of prints--the Artist Intrepid, a guy who set out for distant parts with his brushes in hand, an explorer and recorder of the places he went and the times in which he lived. I'll continue to keep an eye out for his work and snap it up whenever possible, but especially more plates from American Scenery. Only 117 more to go.