Museum digital exhibit features color catalogs

Thursday, January 10, 2013

— The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art launched its first digital exhibition Tuesday - a 69-piece collaboration with University of Arkansas Libraries titled Fruit-full Arkansas: Apples.

Images for the exhibition can be seen around the world by anyone who has an Internet connection, and they include artwork from color-plate nursery catalogspublished between 1851 and 1922 that were taken from the Crystal Bridges library collection.

The images of apples, the fruit once considered the symbol of economic prosperity in Northwest Arkansas, are among more than 1,200 items included in an acquisition by Crystal Bridges in 2006, said Catherine Peterson, the museum’s library director.

“It really is the most complete and renowned collection of 19th century American color-plate books,” she said. The Beinecke Library at Yale University has a comparable collection, but the Yale collection includes more than American books, Peterson added.

Patrons may view the Crystal Bridges books at the museum’s library.

Color-plate printing of nursery catalogs began in Rochester, N.Y., in the first few decades of the 19th century, when the growing nursery industry began competing for sales of fruits, vegetables, trees and flowers, according to a news release distributed by the UA with the launch of the exhibit Tuesday.

Materials were mostly chromolithographs (colored pictures printed using lithography) and other types of printmaking, such as that done with copper or metal plates. Pouchoir, or hand-coloring through a stencil, was also used.

The striking images in the printed color-plate seed catalogs portrayed an array of products, often with fetching text.

“It was kind of an advertising feature in many ways because they wanted to sell these seeds, and it was done through the beautiful reproduction of chromolithography,” Peterson said.

The images “had to look good,” said Timothy Nutt, head of Special Collections at the UA libraries. “It’s just like the pie sitting out in the [ Fayetteville restaurant] Village Inn, you want it to look good so it entices people. That’s the horticultural version of it.”

The UA libraries’ contribution to the project is an array of materials taken from its Special Collections manuscripts and book collections, including folklore class reports, folk customs, poetry and souvenir booklets of Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas.

The Benton County Historical Society provided information on the history of the Arkansas apple industry. By 1910, Benton and Washington counties had a combined 2 million apple trees, the most in any state in the country.

Adding to the “fun” of the exhibition, said Peterson, is that UA professor emeritus of horticulture Roy C. Rompitched in materials from his personal collection.

“It’s a curated exhibition of items from our collection and items from their collection,” Peterson said of Crystal Bridges and UA. The name for the exhibition was derived from an 1890 railroad advertisement that enticed people to venture to “Arkansas, the world’s orchard: A fruit-full hand in Arkansas.”

Nutt said talks about the project started last summer with work beginning in the fall. Success will be gauged by hits on the exhibition website, as well as interest shown in the project.

“We’re hoping to get people interested in wanting either images from our collections or wanting to go up to Crystal Bridges to actually look at the materials,” Nutt said.

Those most likely to request copies of images or seek more information will be horticulturists, historians and “people who are just interested in the materials from the artistic standpoint,” Nutt said.

“The botanical prints that the library at Crystal Bridges holds are just really works of art, so anyone interested in that process of creating those botanical prints - what went into them, just the beauty of the image” - will be interested, he said.

Crystal Bridges’ seed catalog color-plate books are just one genre the museum possesses. Others that could also be digitized include botanical books, surgical books, atlases and more.

“Our goal is to make many of these items digitally available,” Peterson said.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/10/2013