Landing Some Big Fish

Crystal Bridges exhibit reels in historic prints

Images courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum Samuel Kilbourne, a famous wildlife painter, created the images in “Fish Stories,” on display now at Crystal Bridges Museum, but the exhibit illustrates the importance of chromolithography to the reproduction of art.
Images courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum Samuel Kilbourne, a famous wildlife painter, created the images in “Fish Stories,” on display now at Crystal Bridges Museum, but the exhibit illustrates the importance of chromolithography to the reproduction of art.

Producing 1,000 copies of "Game Fishes of the United States," a faithful reproduction of the paintings of a renowned wildlife artist, took two years. As painstaking as the pace set from 1879 to 1880 seems today, it compares to 13 years to make about 200 copies of John James Audubon's "The Birds of America" earlier in the same century.

"Game Fishes" is an outstanding example of a technique for reproducing art that's known by the imposing name of chromolithography, says Catherine Petersen, library director at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Twenty prints from the library's copy of "Game Fishes" are on display at the museum through Sept. 21 in an exhibit called "Fish Stories: Early Images of American Game Fish." The technique used to make the prints is still used today for reproductions of fine art, she says.

FAQ

‘Fish Stories’

WHEN — Through Sept. 21, with drop-in art making (fish prints) on May 30 & the CR(EAT)E Food Series: Brews and Fish of the Ozarks on June 28

WHERE — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville

COST — Free

INFO — crystalbridges.org

"It was an important, serious effort to make art accessible to more people," Petersen says of the publishers practicing the technique. The method was also very important for spreading knowledge, she says. For instance, anatomical books showing surgical techniques used the same process, as did reference works on everything from flowers and fruits to spiders and seashells.

"When E.B. White was writing 'Charlotte's Web,' he used a reference book that used this," Petersen says.

There was no better way from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th for reproducing scientific accuracy, artistic faithfulness to the original work or both at an affordable cost, she says.

Copies of Audubon's work required artists to provide the colors. Every picture in each book started as a printed outline, taken of one of the original paintings. Each outline was filled in by hand with watercolors.

This process made the books detailed, lifelike and true to the artist's original work. It also made them rare and very expensive. A single bound set of "Birds" purchased by the University of Michigan in 1839, for instance, cost $970. This would amount to at least $22,000 in today's money. One of the few places the public can see a complete collection is at the University of Michigan library. The original purchase remains on display, opened one page per day.

"Game Fishes" started the same way, with paintings by an artist. That artist was Samuel Kilbourne, a famous wildlife painter whose life ended the year after "Game Fishes" was complete. He worked in cooperation with ichthyologist George Brown Goode, who provided the book's text and was head of the fish research programs of the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries at the time. That agency later became part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"Goode went on to become famous as a museum administrator," Petersen says. "He had a major influence on how museums were designed and how exhibits are displayed, playing a major role in setting up the Smithsonian Institute." Goode met Kilbourne at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the first official World's Fair held in the United States.

Working from Kilbourne's paintings, artists would draw imagines from the paintings onto a stone, using a grease pencil. The limestone was then brushed with a layer of chemicals that removes a very thin layer of stone everywhere that isn't covered by the drawing. What's left is used to print one color. Each different color used requires a different stone. The number of stones needed to reproduce one page varied with the image and the number of colors used.

The color plates on exhibit capture a number of distinctly American fish in their natural surroundings, including the striped bass, red snapper and brook trout. "One of the most appealing things about this exhibit is that many of these fish are found in Arkansas lakes and rivers," Petersen says. Fishermen from the state can recognize several of the catches, and all visitors to the exhibit are invited to write down and leave "fish stories" of their own.

Like the Audubon book, the prints of "Game Fishes" went out periodically to subscribers. These subscribers paid $100 in total, still a princely sum at that time but clearly more affordable than books using previous methods, Petersen says. Only 1,000 sets were made, each one numbered. Crystal Bridges owns No. 70, Petersen says. The number of collections that survive intact is not known, she says.

NAN What's Up on 05/08/2015

Upcoming Events