In their daily lives, Americans at the end of the 19th century encountered more images than any other culture had yet experienced. Trends converged to produce an explosive growth in illustrated media of all types: America’s rising population became increasingly literate. The introduction of a second-class postal rate and improved railroad networks meant faster and wider distribution of printed goods. America’s expanding manufacturing capabilities spawned a consumer economy buoyed by mass communication, especially ADVERTISING. Images captured attention and conveyed information, and they were put to the service of this new economy. Newly minted professionals—commercial artists, illustrators, photographers, and graphic designers— supplied these images.
In the 1880s and 1890s, important advances were made in the technologies used for the mass reproduction of images. By 1876 the Webb press could print 15,000 large-format sheets per hour, and Mergenthaler’s linotype machine, in use at the New York Tribune by 1886, was one of several devices that mechanized typesetting. Wood engraving, the staple of the illustrated media at mid-century, was supplanted by various methods of photoengraving, especially the halftone. By this process any image could be photographed through a screen that converted it into a set of dots that were then transferred mechanically, via acid, to a printing plate. Although printing plates were often improved by hand, the halftone process eliminated the need for large corps of engravers. Professional photographers flourished as the dry-plate process, accessory lenses, and handheld cameras made photography less cumbersome and complex. Amateur photography boomed after 1888 when the Kodak camera was introduced, with its slogan “you push the button and we do the rest.” Chromolithography, used for color images, became more industrialized and less costly. In short, the production of images became a profession separate from the production of other printed matter, and images could be created much faster and at a much lower cost.
A wide variety of media incorporated images. In 1865, 700 periodicals were published in America, but by 1900 the number was 5,000. Illustrated MAGAZINES and NEWSPAPERS were published daily, weekly, and monthly and were aimed at the most general and the most specialized audiences. Among those that owed their success to their illustrations were Scribner’s, Century, Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Weekly, Ladies’ Home Journal, Popular Science, and Life. Publishing conglomerates were formed; Harper’s, for example, published four major magazines in addition to their books. Novels and children’s books were commonly illustrated. Advertising and promotional media proliferated, and trade cards, posters, and packaging were often produced in vivid color chromolithography. Illustration pervaded every aspect of life through ephemeral and miscellaneous materials such as sheet-MUSiC covers, stock certificates, wallpapers, billheads, and receipts. Portrait photography came within the reach of most households. Large photographic companies commissioned depictions of subjects of public interest: foreign countries, the American West, celebrities, and newsworthy events such as world’s fairs. These images were published as stereographs, cabinet cards, and in portfolios that were commonly sold through bookstores. With the improved printing methods, photography in magazines, newspapers, and reports also became commonplace.
All these images were supplied by artists who often straddled the worlds of fine art and commercial art. Prominent painters, among them Edwin Austin Abbey, Howard Pyle, and FREDERIC Remington, also produced oils intended as book and magazine illustrations. The Gibson Girl, introduced in 1890, became a vehicle for social synopsis, and its creator, Charles Dana Gibson, was a celebrated art editor, publisher, and painter.
Illustrations could be a force for social change; JACOB RllS’s photographs of slum images in How the Other Half Lives (1890) prompted housing reform. In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge first used stop-action photography to document a horse trotting, and his continued work advanced the scientific study of animal and human locomotion. Mainly, though, illustration illuminated or decorated. Will Bradley introduced the art nouveau style to American audiences through his posters and magazine covers. While fine engravings produced in limited editions by James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Mary Cassatt entered the collections of connoisseurs, high-quality chromolithographs, such as William Michael Harnett’s The Old Violin and Daniel Ridgway Knight’s Hailing the Ferry, decorated middle-class houses.
Editors and publishers, such as Charles Parsons at Harper’s, Cyrus H. K. Curtis of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and Louis Prang, maker of chromolithographs and greeting cards, shaped America’s visual culture.
The history of American late-19th-century illustration is still largely unwritten. Because so many artists worked freelance and anonymously, their accomplishments remain untraceable except through the initials they incorporated within their illustrations.
Further reading: Michele H. Bogart, Advertising, Artists and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Susan E. Meyer, America’s Great Illustrators (New York: Galahad Books, 1978); Martha A. Sandweiss et al., Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991); Ellen Mazur Thomson, The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870-1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
—Karen Zukowski
World History
