Picturing Victorian America

Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, 1830-1880

Nancy Finlay

Publication Year: 2009

This is the first book-length account of the pioneering and prolific Kellogg family of lithographers, active in Connecticut for over four decades. Daniel Wright Kellogg opened his print shop on Main Street in Hartford five years before Nathaniel Currier went into a similar business in New York and more than twenty-five years before Currier founded his partnership with James M. Ives, yet Daniel and his brothers Elijah and Edmund Kellogg have long been overshadowed by the Currier & Ives printmaking firm.

Editor Nancy Finlay has gathered together eight essays that explore the complexity of the relationships between artists, lithographers, and print, map, and book publishers. Presenting a complete visual overview of the Kelloggs' production between 1830 and 1880, Picturing Victorian America also provides museums, libraries, and private collectors with the information needed to document the Kellogg prints in their own collections. The first comprehensive study of the Kellogg prints, this book demands reconsideration of this Connecticut family's place in the history of American graphic and visual arts.

CONTRIBUTORS: Georgia B. Barnhill, Lynne Zacek Bassett, Candice C. Brashears, Nancy Finlay, Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Richard C. Malley, Sally Pierce, Michael Shortell, Kate Steinway.

Published by: Wesleyan University Press

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Cover

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pp. v-vi

Director’s Foreword

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pp. vii-ix

Founded in 1825, the Connecticut Historical Society has a long history of collecting the raw materials of regional history, art, and material culture. Like a safari vest with numerous compartments, the Connecticut Historical Society houses pockets of distinctive and disparate collections, all useful and many essential for anyone exploring Connecticut’s rich ...

Project Supporters

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pp. xi-

Acknowledgments

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pp. xiii-xv

This publication would not have been possible without the help and support of a wide range of individuals, institutions, and funding agencies. Most of the background research, including the cataloging of all 1,100 Kellogg prints in the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS) collection, was carried out by one loyal volunteer...

1. Introduction: Taking a Fresh Look at Nineteenth-Century Lithography

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pp. 1-10

Thus an 1849 article in the Hartford Daily Courant described the process of lithography and the bustling print shop on Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut, where the Kellogg brothers produced their lithographic prints. Lithography, literally, the art of drawing on stone, had been invented in Germany in the 1790s and introduced in the United States only in the...

2. From Hartford to Everywhere: The History of the Kellogg Firm and Its Associates

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pp. 11-26

On November 8, 1833, Daniel W. Kellogg (fig. 14) wrote to John Richardson in Washington, North Carolina, regarding a shipment of lithographic prints that he was sending on the New York packet. The shipment included one hundred plain and five hundred colored prints. ...

3. Family Values and Victorian Virtues in Kellogg Prints of Home and Family

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pp. 27-38

These inexpensive and popular pictures of devoted husbands, contented mothers and children, and loving siblings, along with similar prints by Currier & Ives and contemporary paintings, novels, stories, and children’s and advice books, broadcast imagery of family happiness and engendered good behavior across the nation.²...

4. Dressing Romantically: Clothing in Kellogg Prints, 1830–1860

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pp. 39-48

Like the decorative and fine arts, costume is affected by a period’s social and economic pressures and priorities, and thus is a manifestation of the times in which it is created.¹ The costumes depicted in the Kellogg brothers’ lithographs are not merely fashionable or fanciful coverings for the people portrayed; they are thoughtfully designed and used...

5. Gothic Style: A Personal and National Taste

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pp. 49-60

The Kellogg lithographic firm entered into the business of producing and selling popular prints at a time when Gothic Revival was the new style in American architecture and the decorative arts.¹ From the 1830s to the 1850s, pointed arches, battlemented towers, stone buttresses, diamond-paned windows, quatrefoils, trefoils, tracery, and other medieval...

6. Written on Stone: Family Registers, Family Trees, and Memorial Prints

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pp. 61-72

The firm established by Daniel W. Kellogg was successful because Daniel and his successors were attuned to the marketplace and served the needs of the print-buying public. This phenomenon is particularly apparent in their publication of family registers, family trees, and memorial prints to record genealogical information.¹ The acquisition and...

7. The Kellogg Brothers’ Images of the Mexican War and the Birth of Modern-Day News

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pp. 73-84

While prints had served for many decades to popularize America’s wars and heroes, to rally citizens around patriotic causes, or to incite public dissent against a common enemy, it was the sheer number of images and speed of their production during the Mexican War (May 13, 1846 to February 2, 1848) that made it the first fully “illustrated”...

8. Sail and Steam on Stone: Maritime Prints of the Kelloggs

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pp. 85-98

When the Kelloggs established their lithography business, America was a nation with one eye cast eastward on the Atlantic world and the other contemplating the seemingly limitless potential of western lands. Although it is tempting to characterize this as a clear divide between the past and the future, for most Americans, especially those living...

Georgia B. Barnhill , Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, has published widely on nineteenth-century American prints. Her most recent works include Visualizing American History: The Role of Prints in Expressing Nationalism (U.S. Department of State, 2005), Bibliography on American Prints of the Seventeenth through the...

Index of Proper Names and Illustrations

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pp. 227-233

E-ISBN-13: 9780819571250
Print-ISBN-13: 9781881264095

Page Count: 252
Publication Year: 2009