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Albert Alden (1812-1883), The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man’s Life, from the Cradle to the Grave, wherein all Christians May Behold their Frail Nature, and the Miseries that Attend a Sinful Life, Set Forth in an Alphabetical Poem. Barre, Mass.: Printed by Thompson and Alden, [ca. 1835-1840]. Broadside with a large allegorical wood engraving attributed to Albert Alden. Paul M. Ingersoll, Class of 1950, Graphic Arts Acquisitions Fund. Graphic Arts Broadside Collection.

Picturing the different ages and/or stages of life has been a favorite subject of artists, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. The earliest broadsides were printed for a popular audience, to appeal to their fears about life and death; sin and salvation; and stimulate the belief in a moral life.

In 1540, the German painter Jörg Breu, the younger (ca. 1510-1547) published Ten Ages of Man, one of the first engravings showing the steps of life, with staircases leading both up and down, as man passes from the cradle to the grave. Abraham Bach repeated the motif in the seventeenth century, but added a woman on each step, with the more politically correct title, Ten Ages of Human Life.

This seventeenth-century Ages of Man engraving closely resembles the nineteenth-century broadside held in Princeton’s graphic arts collection. It presents a man’s life in eleven steps, with three muses in the central arch below. Albert Alden’s broadside depicts life in eleven stages, but offers the more typical devil at the bottom center, tempting two men. One accepts and one rejects these temptations. In both prints, a clock is ticking, moving us ever closer to midnight.

The Pennsylvania printmaker Gustav S. Peters designed another version, with only slight variations, as did James Baillie, Nathaniel Currier, and the Kellogg Brothers. Dozens of other versions were published, purchased, and hung on bedroom walls throughout the nineteenth century.

For more information, see Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: a Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Firestone Library (F) HQ1064.U5 C526 1992
and
Alan Wallach, “Voyage of Life as popular art,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 2 (June 1977)

Engraved by Bernard Picart (1673-1733) after a design by Pierre Gaubert (1659-1741), La défaite de Porus [Defeat of Porus by Alexander the Great at the Battle of the Hydaspes], ca. 1730. Engraving. Graphic Arts French prints

In 326 B.C.E., along the banks of the Hydaspes River, in what is present day Pakistan, there was a battle between King Porus of Paurava (4th century B.C.E.) and Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.E.). Alexander’s men faced an army that included 200 war elephants, which led the first charge. After a long and bloody battle, 3,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry were killed, leaving Alexander and his men the victors. Impressed by the dignity of King Porus, Alexander is said to have made peace with him and given him the kingship of neighboring territory.

Picart created this scene at the same time that he was completing thousands of prints for the massive study Religious Ceremonies of the World (Ex Oversize 5017.247.11f). Professor Anthony Grafton wrote, “In 1723, the engraver Bernard Picart and the printer Jean Frederic Bernard revealed the varied religions of the world to European readers. In seven splendidly illustrated folio volumes that appeared from 1723 to 1737, Religious Ceremonies of the World offered—at least to anyone strong enough to lift one of the volumes and open it—a tableau of the world’s priests and believers, in action.” “A Jewel of a Thousand Facets,” New York Review of Books June 24, 2010.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a similar, large format print of this battle, engraved by Picart but after a design by Charles le Brun (1619-1790). Unfortunately no image has been posted on their database.

See more:
Philip Freeman, Alexander the Great (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). (Dixon) Firestone DF234 .F74 2011
and
Lynn Avery Hunt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Firestone BL80.3 .H86 2010

This is an early nineteenth-century version of the Game of the Goose, which is claimed to have been a gift from Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1541-1613) to King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) sometime between 1574 and 1587. According to H. J. R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other than Chess (Firestone GV1312 .M8 1952), the Game of the Goose reached England by 1597, when John Wolfe entered “the newe and most pleasant game of the Goose” in the Stationers’ Register.

No matter what the theme, the board consists of sixty-three numbered spaces arranged in a spiral. In La prix de sagesse each of the numbered compartments depicts a fable from Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), arranged around a center square. Rules are also given in English, along with brief summaries of the fables in verse to left and to right.

The French poet La Fontaine published 243 fables in twelve books from 1668 to 1694. He took his inspiration from Aesop, Horace, and ancient Indian literature such as the Panchatantra. The first collection of Fables Choisies (Ex 3262.33.173) appeared March 31, 1668, dedicated to “Monseigneur” Louis de France (1661-1711) the six-year-old son and heir of Louis XIV, King of France and Maria Theresa of Spain.

Rare Books and Special Collections holds more than 150 editions of La Fontaine’s Fables. The Cotsen collection holds over two dozen different versions of the Game of the Goose, included a variant edition of the La Fontaine: Jeu instructif des Fables de la Fontaine (Paris: Basset [between 1835 and 1845]). (CTSN) Print Case LA / Box 99 103446

For English translations of the fables, see http://oaks.nvg.org/fontaine.html

The Swedish miniature painter Niclas Lafrensen created this Rococo scene in gouache to be engraved by the Parisian master printer Nicolas Delaunay and sold through the fine print market. The print is dedicated to Countess d’Ogny, wife of a young nobleman Claude-François-Marie Rigolet, Comte d’Ogny (1757-1790). We see Madame d’Ogny choosing wallpaper, taking a singing lesson, and having her hair done while entertaining guests in an elegant sitting room.

It is interesting to note that Comte d’Ogny, the founder of the Paris-based music society, Concert de la Loge olympique, and patron of Franz Josef Haydn, was known for his extravagance and left a debt of 100,000 livres when he died.

Lafrensen and Delaunay also created a pendant scene: Le billet doux (The Love Letter) showing a man slipping a letter to one woman while chatting with another.

Delaunay engraved a number of book illustrations. Here are a few:
Arnaud Berquin (1747-1791). Idylles, romances, et autres poésies de Berquin (Paris: Ant. Aug. Renouard, 1803). Cotsen Children’s Library (CTSN) Euro 18 23489

Jean Michel Moreau (1741-1814), Dessins de Moreau ([Paris: s.n., 1776-1779]). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2008-2366N

On April 12, 1806, John James Audubon (1785-1851) sailed back to the United States under a false passport to take responsibility for the family estate at Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. The 248 acres of farmland and woods had significant mining deposits and Audubon’s responsibilities included the lead mines.

A friend in Nantes had introduced Audubon to pastels and the twenty-one year old preferred to spend his time roaming the hills along the Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River hunting and sketching. This drawing was completed just three months after his arrival.

When Audubon married a few years later and moved to Kentucky, this early drawing went with him to serve as a model for his famous Birds of America, plate 42: Whip-poor-will (Caprimulgus Vociferus, Wills.).

Billingsgate was an enormous fish market in eighteenth and nineteenth-century London, and a slang term for coarsely abusive or profane language. The artist of this sketch was John Locker (1773-1834), chief magistrate and registrar of the Vice Admiralty Court at Malta. As the son of Captain William Locker (1731-1800), Lieutenant-Governor of Greenwich Hospital and a great patron to the arts, John was introduced to many painters while growing up, including Gilbert Stewart (1755-1828), who painted Captain Locker’s portrait shortly before he died.

Both John and his brother Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849) were educated at Eton College and received training in the visual arts before pursuing naval careers. Edward was the only one to publish his art. In 1813, during the Peninsular War, he traveled to Spain with Lord John Russell and later published a memoir entitled Views of Spain (1824), with illustrations after his own watercolors (Ex 1521.592).

Captain Locker planned a gallery of naval art but it fell to Edward, who became an administrator at Greenwich Hospital, to finally establish a National Maritime Museum. His son, John’s nephew, was Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821-1895), a minor poet and major bibliophile. In Frederick’s book My Confidences. An Autobiographical Sketch Addressed to My Descendants, he wrote, “The Lockers were a homely-looking race.”

“…Uncle John Locker, who was very ugly, used to say that you could not widen the mouth of a Locker without injury to his ears. One day at Malta, at the dinner table, he asked a stranger, who had just landed, to take wine, expressing his pleasure in seeing him there and his obligation in these words: ‘Yesterday, sir, I was the ugliest man in all Malta!’ Tradition says that the man did not resent this speech, so I presume my uncle, with all his impudence, had some social tact.”

Princeton University’s Rare Book collections hold 194 editions of James Thomson’s The Seasons, published from 1726 to 1970, with up to a dozen copies of some editions. The four poems were originally embellished with four allegorical figures of the seasons and later editions included small engravings. In 1793, John Murray brought out an edition “adorned with a set of engravings,” after the designs of Thomas Stothard (1755-1834).

Eighteen ink and wash sketches by Stothard can be found in the graphic arts collection, with handwritten captions from The Seasons. Each has been assigned a day and month, with two drawings each for nine out of the twelve months. Curator Nancy Finlay has speculated that the set was prepared for an edition of the extremely rare Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas. (http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/pulc/pulc_v_42_n_3.pdf)

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, the artist and librarian began his career in 1779 as an illustrator of books and magazines. Within a year, he sold no less than 148 drawings to the Novelist’s Magazine, for which he was paid a guinea each. Stothard went on to illustrate many important novels, including works by Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Sterne, Ridley’s Tales of the Genii, Paltock’s Peter Wilkins, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights, the Vicar of Wakefield, and Gulliver’s Travels.

Stothard revived his designs for The Seasons late in life when he was commissioned to decorate the great staircase at Buckingham Palace.

See also: James Thomson (1700-1748), The Seasons (London: J. Murray, 1793). Rare Books (Ex) 3960.2.38.14

The sign above the door on the right announces “Patent Shavograph!!” In the main room, the Shavograph operated from right to left, with customers on a circular bench. Several are missing noses or other features, thanks to the machine.

Seymour notes, “Accidents will occur in the best regulated families,” which was picked up in 1850 by Charles Dickens, when he wrote, “‘My dear friend Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances the - a - I would say, in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.”

This print is one of many announcing various shaving machines. In 1745, J. Dubois sold the etching, A Perspective View and Section of an Engine Propos’d to be Built by Subscription which will Shave Sixty Men a Minute, also Oyl Comb and Powder their Wigs. Here is an image from the British Museum.

Seymour’s caricature refers to the Roman Catholic Relief Act passed by the British Parliament on March 24, 1829. The Act permitted members of the Catholic Church to sit in parliament, something previously forbidden even if they won an election. The Catholic middle classes could now have new careers in the higher civil service and in the judiciary.

In the center of Seymour’s print are the politicians Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington and Prime Minister 1828-1830; Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet (1788-1850) and Prime Minister 1834-1835; and an old woman as doctor, apothecary, and nurse. She is holding a steaming bowl of Political Caudle and a large open book, entitled The Times. She says to Wellington, “Oh! the dear creature, how many will accompany it to Ireland, to spend their money—no doubt Dublin will become more fashionable than Paris—now Doctor never mind the windy warfare of those Gentlemen above!”

On the far left is the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), founder of the Catholic Association and promoter of the Emancipation Bill. His followers ask him: “Will Mancipation make the Prates grow?” O’Connell answers “Yes.” “Shall we get plenty of Whiskey?” “Yes.” “Will bogs breed Pigs & shall we all wear warm wigs & silk cloaks like you Dan?” “Yes.”

The Times forecast an Emancipation Bill in December 1828 and in February, published some of its provisions. Seymour published his caricature on March 2 and the Act was formally introduced on March 5.

John James Audubon (1785-1851), Tamias Quadrivittatus, Striped Ground Squirrel, 1841. Two pen and watercolor drawings. Gifts of John Stanton Williams, Class of 1925. GC154 John James Audubon Collection. Drawn for Audubon’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. No. 5, Plate 24 (below).

The last ten years of Audubon’s life were spent documenting four-legged mammals. He traveled up the Missouri River and around the Southern United States with his collaborator, Reverend Dr. John Bachman (1790-1874). The original folio edition of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848) contains 150 colored lithographs executed by the British engraver John T. Bowen (1801-ca. 1856), working in Philadelphia. These prints were made after watercolor drawings, about half of which are the work of Audubon and the other half were by his son, John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862).

Two drawings for the Striped Ground Squirrel were completed in May 1841 (the final plate combined them into one image of four squirrels). Audubon noted, “We met with this species as we were descending the Upper Missouri … we saw it first on a tree; afterwards we procured both old and young among the sandy gulleys and clay cliffs, on the sides of the ravines near one of our encampments.”

This drawing comes to Princeton thanks to John Stanton Williams (1902-1982, Class of 1925), who also donated Audubon’s shotgun. Mr. Williams was the founder of the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, N.Y. and an ardent collector of Audubon’s work.

Often overshadowed by Birds of North America, the imperial folio edition of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America is a scholarly and artistically beautiful work. It was not until 1952 that Quadrupeds came to Princeton University as a gift from Edwin N. Benson, Jr. Class of 1899 and Mrs. Benson, in memory of their son Peter Benson, Class of 1938. Our copy of the first edition (three volumes) was bound at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, stamped M.P.

Franz Xaver Habermann (1721-1796), [Representation de feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck], 1776. Cut and painted etching. Graphic Arts GA 1995.00006.

This is one of a number of perspective prints or vues d’optique depicting scenes from the American Revolution. The images of New York City, Boston, and other American cities are imagined scenes, drawn by various artists and etched by the German printmaker Franz Xaver Habermann (1721-1796). Perspective prints were usually titled in several languages and marketed in Paris, Augsburg, London, and elsewhere.

Princeton’s copy was once framed to fit a viewing box. It no longer has a title or caption along the bottom of the image (although there is a hand-written note on the verso). The original title in French was Representation de feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck and in German Schröckenvolle Feuersbrunst welche zu Neu Yorck. The English translation is The Great Fire in New York.

For more, see D. H. Cresswell, American Revolution in Drawings and Prints, item 268

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote the satirical household manual Directions to Servants in 1745 (RHT 18th-581) and eight years later, Jane Collier (1715?-1755) followed with An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (Ex 3684.585.333). Her anti-etiquette handbook provided advice on how to nag and was quickly reprinted six times.

In 1809, an illustrated edition was planned by the popular print publisher Thomas Tegg (1776-1846). The new, corrected, revised, and illustrated Essay featured five plates designed by George Moutard Woodward (1760-1809). A folded frontispiece was etched by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) after Woodward’s drawing (GA Rowlandson 1808.11).

Collier’s narrator advised, “If you have no children, keep as large a quantity of tame animals as you conveniently can. If you have children, a smaller number will do. Shew the most extravagant fondness you possibly can for all these animals. Let them be of the most troublesome and mischievous sort, such as cats, monkeys, parrots, squirrels, and little snarling lapdogs. Their uses for the Tormenting [of] your servants are various.”

Woodward’s frontispiece, as described by Joseph Grego (1843-1908), includes a Savoyard with a barrel-organ and a troop of dancing dogs; a Frenchman with a dancing bear; and a showman dragging a dromedary, with a monkey perched on its back pulling the animal’s ears. Everyone is taunting or torturing someone else.

Graphic Arts has copies of the print in the bound volume, as a separate sheet, and in Caricature Magazine, or Hudibrastic Mirror, another project on which Woodward, Rowlandson, and Tegg were collaborating in 1808. (GA Rowlandson 1807.5f).

See also Joseph Grego (1843-1908), Rowlandson the Caricaturist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880). Graphic Arts (GARF) Oversize NE642.R7 G8q

According to a story in The Financial Times, Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) lost £20,000 in the 1720 South Sea Company stock crash and is reported as having said, “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

In a single year, the price of the South Sea Company stock rose to £1,000 per share and then, dropped to £150. People from all walks of life lost money, sometimes everything they owned, leading to a country-wide frenzy. In the following year, there were reports of widespread fraud. Poems were written and caricatures were drawn satirizing the many fools who were caught up in the South Sea Bubble. The fools were known as the Bubblers.

“Death is the End of all Men” is the declaration of this ticket for the “Bubblers funeral.” Satirically presented to the directors of the South Sea Company, the ticket invites the holder to “accompany the whole Body of S.S. Directors from ye Bubbling house in the Broad way…” in a funeral procession “to ye three Legged Tree near Padington on Fryday the of February 1720/1.”

Its writer, engraver, and publisher George Bickhan is perhaps best known for the writing manual The Universal Penman, issued in 52 parts from 1733 to 1748. [Cotsen Folios 13674]

In the top center of this satire on the South Sea Company stock collapse is a man behind bars with a begging pot. The rest of the sheet is filled with trompe l’oeil ballad broadsides, presenting overlapping stories about people who lost their fortune in the scandal of 1720. At the bottom right is an anamorphic image of a man on a horse, perhaps a coded message to escape if you can.

John Gay (1685-1732) wrote The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 to lampoon the Whig statesman Robert Walpole, and politicians in general, as well as the notorious criminals Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard. In 1812, George Cruikshank (1792-1878) brought the story into the nineteenth century with his etching Polly and Lucy Takeing [sic] Off Restrictions, Vide [referring to] Beggar’s Opera.

In Cruikshank’s satire, the Prince Regent (later King George IV) is seen as the highwayman Macheath, standing between Maria Anne Fitzherbert (1756-1837) as Polly Peachum, on the left, and Lady Hertford (1760-1834) as Lucy Lockit, on the right. They are undoing the restraints put on the Prince/Macheath, who had been committed to Newgate Prison.

Like Macheath, the Prince had been shackled with terms of the Regency Bill, passed on February 4, 1811, which limited the Regent’s powers. These restrictions expired February 1812 and Cruikshank finished his print the following month. Mrs. Fitzherbert, like Polly, was married to the Regent and here represents the Catholic interest or the Opposition.

This winter, the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City mounted an exhibition of a collaborative project between an artist and a writer. Watercolors by the Scottish painter, Callum Innes, were exhibited alongside excerpts from the short story that inspired them, water | colour, by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín.

According to their press release, the gallery introduced Innes and Tóibín in February 2010. A long-time admirer of Innes’s work, Tóibín spoke at length with Innes about the artist’s watercolors during their initial meeting. The conversation was continued at Innes’s studio in Edinburgh last summer. As their creative connections became apparent and their friendship grew, the gallery asked Tóibín to write an essay in response to Innes’s works on paper, a request that led to Tóibín’s short story water | colour. After reading Tóibín’s text, Innes created a new body of watercolors based on it.

Tóibín’s text tells the story of Nora, a middle-aged housewife struggling with the recent death of her husband and its effect on her family. Tóibín elegantly weaves a poignant tale of loss, depression and, ultimately, the promise of healing, placed against the backdrop of the unique colors of the Irish shoreline.

Not only did the gallery produce an exhibition catalogue with the text and reproductions of the watercolors, but they also published ten unique livres d’artistes, with the complete short story and five original watercolors by Innes. Each of the deluxe, hand-bound books is named after one of the characters in the story. Graphic Arts is fortunate to have acquired conor.

Colm Tóibín is currently the Leonard L. Milberg ‘53 Visiting Lecturer in English and Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University. If you are a fan, another original story by Tóibín can be found in the current issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle 72, no.1 (autumn 2010).

Sean Kelly Gallery exhibit: http://www.skny.com/exhibitions/2010-12-16_callum-innes-colm-toibin/

The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor was founded and edited by George Manners (1778-1853). Beginning in October 1807, the monthly journal exposed the foolishness of contemporary politicians, opening with a folded frontispiece caricature. Manners sold the magazine in 1812 to the Scottish journalist William Jerdan (1782-1869), who ran it until 1814.

This print is signed by The Caricaturist General. Several others in The Satirist are designed by Sylvester Scrutiny. Neither artist can be identified. Many are etched by “de Wilde” e.g. Samuel De Wilde (1751-1832), a portrait painter and etcher who specialized in theatrical subjects.

Bony’s Visions or a Great Little Man’s Night Comforts was published in volume 9, p. 165 as an illustration to “The Vision of Buonaparte,” p.110-21, which claims to be the Emperor’s account of a dream the night after his son’s birth.

In it, we see Napoleon, wearing a night-shirt, leap from a canopied bed, terrified at the demons, goblins, and ghosts that surround him. He holds a dagger and calls, “Duroc, Savory, Roustan, aux armes aux armes.” Napoleon’s son is nursed by a demon, who says: “Dear Image of my darling Nap, / Suck milk of Hell instead of pap.”

Near the bed is a coffin marked with ‘N’ and a crown; on this are a rat and two birds; a stork and an owl. An imp with antlers, crouching on the bed-curtain, is about to knock off with a wand the crown surmounting Napoleon’s night-cap.

There is good reason the prints in The Satirist are rarely credited. George Manners and his writers were the targets of multiple lawsuits. The magazine was only two years old when Manners wrote Vindiciæ Satiricæ, or a Vindication of the Principles of the “Satirist,” (1809) documenting the action brought by Peter Finnerty.

Three years later, Thomas Gill wrote, Libels: a Statement of the Trial of an Indictment against George Manners, … 1st June, 1811, for Libels in The Satirist of the 1st May, 1809, and 1st September, 1810, on the Character of William Hallett, Esq., upon which Indictment the Defendant was Found Guilty….

In the third volume, Manners published a statement:
Notwithstanding the unparalleled opposition which we have experienced, and the multitude of hostile scoundrels whom we have encountered, our publication is daily increasing its circulation….

We have dragged from their filthy dens a horde of miscreants, who battened on the fruits of slander, who mangled and destroyed alike the characters of the guilty and the innocent, and who, the moment we exposed them to the public eye, have either shrunk into their original insignificance, or only been noticed like gibbet ted murderers, for the enormity of their crimes.

…We defy our enemies to point out a single instance where we have inflicted unmerited punishment, or bestowed unjust commendation. …Adieu for the present, dear Sir Richard, thou hast afforded us much amusement, but more melancholy reflections on the pride, vain glory, and hypocrisy of mankind: if we have waged war against thy vanity, folly, and—errors, remember, we were not the first to kindle the flame!

See also William Jerdan (1782-1869), The Autobiography of William Jerdan (London: A. Hall, Virtue & Co., 1852-53).Firestone Library 3802.4.31

The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, 1807-1814. Graphic Arts Collection Cruik 1808 v.1-14. Gift of Richard Waln Meirs, Class of 1888.

When the British Whig Charles James Fox died in 1806, he left a rather large hole to be filled in the British government. In this print, Gillray shows members of the new Ministry of all the Talents (known as the Broad-bottoms) literally inside Fox’s enormous breeches, gorging on fish and loaves of bread. The ghost of Fox is shown at the bottom left, partially emerging from his grave, saying, “O save my Breeches, Heav’n.”

At the center of the scene is James Paull, who lost the 1806 Westminster election, sitting cross legged as the fulcrum in a political tug of war. On one side is the radical Sir Francis Burdett and his friends, while on the left are the Pittites pulling in the opposite direction.

Meanwhile, on the far top right Napoleon carefully watches these events with his spyglass, ready to take advantage of domestic unrest. He says: “Oh! by Gar! if I could but once put My Foot upon the leaver! - I’d give their Broad-bottoms a Shake with a Vengeance!!!”

At the very top, Gillray has inscribed the words: To that last Hope of the Country, - the New Opposition, this Representative of Charley’s Old Breeches in Danger, is Respectfully submitted. 9 January 1807.

Napoleon is in a tree on the right, dressed as a rat wearing a feathered bicorne hat. He says, “I am determined to Beat these brutes in spite of their Teeth” as his soldiers use pincers to pull the bears’ teeth (pull tusk). The French troops had trouble moving through the mud and swamps, arriving late to their positions. The caricature shows them advancing across the River Bug (the signpost reads Bug-Water), in which some are drowning. John Bull is seen as a bull on the hill to the left.

Attributed to Charles Williams (1797-1830), The Battle of Pul-Tusk, 1807. Hand colored etching. Graphic Arts British Caricature.

In 1924, antiquarian Leon Gelber joined with businessman Theodore Max Lilienthal (1893-1972) to establish the Gelber-Lilienthal Book Shop at 336 Sutter Street in San Francisco. As recalled by James Hart in Rare Book Stores in San Francisco Fifty Years Ago, “That shop…was given character by an ingenious false front of a manufactured appearance, a pseudo half-timbered building with a projecting shingled and slanting roof … A small hallway led to a lofty ceiling, in old-English style and great rows of shelves for rare books. …They were two attractive, charming, and witty men, quite without the pressure of salesmanship ….”

The partners also established a publishing company under the imprint Lantern Press. Many of their editions were printed at Grabhorn Press, beginning with Hildegard Flanner’s A Tree in Bloom and Other Verses (1924). Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) PS3511.L28 T7 1924.

It was the Grabhorn Brothers who first introduced them to the illustrator and printmaker Valenti Angelo (1897-1982). Angelo moved to San Francisco when he was nineteen-years-old and ten years later, began cutting and printing book plates. In 1927, Angelo illustrated For Whispers & Chants by Jake Zeitlin, printed by Grabhorn Press and published by Lantern Press (Graphic Arts GAX 2007-1271N).

Throughout his long career, Angelo illustrated roughly 250 books, of which Princeton owns fifty-four. Above is his woodcut of the Gelber-Lilienthal Shop.

See more: Valenti Angelo: Author, Illustrator, Printer (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1976). Rare Books (Ex) Oversize Z8036.483 .V34qr

See also: Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), Theodore Max Lilienthal ([San Francisco: F. B. Lilienthal, Grabhorn Press], 1953).

Special thanks to Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press for his help researching this post. http://www.poltroonpress.com/about.html

Beatrice Coron, Central Park Story, 1994. Pochoir print and stencil. Graphic Arts GA 2007.02453 and 02452. Gift of Beatrice Coron.

left: Beatrice Coron, Last Leaf of Central Park, 1990s. Stencil for pochoir print. Graphic Arts GA 2007.02453. Gift of Beatrice Coron.

right: Beatrice Coron, Lust, 1990s. Pochoir print. Graphic Arts FA 2007.02455. Gift of Beatrice Coron.

Over ten years ago, Graphic Arts was the fortunate recipient of a gift of art from the French paper architect Beatrice Coron, who has been living in New York City since 1984. Those who have ridden the subways in New York will recognize her black paper work from the poster “All Around Town” featured in the cars of the E, F, and 6 trains.

Her website http://www.beatricecoron.com offers additional images as well as a personal statement, which begins: “My work tells stories. I invent situations, cities and worlds. These compositions include memories, associations of words, ideas, observations and thoughts that unfold in improbable juxtapositions. These invented worlds have their own logic and patterns. Images are conveyed through words, whether automatic writing or premeditated scenes. My creative inspiration comes from a text, a poem, the news or from a philosophical concept that can be reduced to a mere title. I research collective memories and myths, questioning the notions of identity and belonging. For each theme, I explore various narratives: one story leads to the next, and the creation process weaves different layers of our relations to the world.”

Beatrice Coron will teach a class in paper cutting at the Center for Book Arts on March 26-27, 2011. For information, see: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/