Heirloom Fruits of America: Selections from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection by Daniel J. Kevles

Heirloom Fruits of America announces its topic, the perfection of a variety of fruits, through immediate aesthetic appeal. Like its subject, this small, delicately colored and thoughtfully designed book asks to be held, savored and digested. Its handheld scale enables it to occupy the cusp between a carefully crafted artist’s book and a factual archive of botanical illustration. In his introduction, historian Daniel Kevles relays some of the social and cultural history of the production, documentation and reception of heirloom fruits in the United States that led to the creation of a Division of Pomology in the Department of Agriculture via the recruitment of art. Kevles relays how chromolithography proved critical to the production of colored plates that could compete in a national market. In the recounting, the book and its contents become works of connoisseurship, practicality, identity and imagination.

In essence, this book is a boundary object. As described by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, boundary objects inhabit multiple communities of practice, enabling them “to travel across borders and maintain some sort of constant identity” [1]. The book encapsulates a host of themes and philosophies involving the merger of early industrialization and the art of growing fruit. The communities traversed include worlds of art and commerce. Kevles articulates how depiction of the fruits enacts a journey from the unique and local to the standardized and mass distributed that references a lineage of patent protections en route. As he describes the voyage, we, the readers, realize that authorship and identification became keys to the success of the pomological enterprise (pomum is Latin for fruit). To succeed, the images of heirloom fruits must function as recognizable names and claim unique identities. Such intellectual property protection was to be found chiefly in the utility patent, the definition of which dates to the 1793 patent law. Without such protection, there was considerably less incentive to perfect and document the fruits, which were subject to appropriation.

Chromolithography is a technique for making multicolored prints that use lithographic stones; it was developed in 1837. Both chromo-and photolithography became essential to traversing the worlds of culture and commerce. At first, watercolors were used to render heirlooms; then coloring was applied by hand to grayscale plates. Chromolithography proved the best way to reproduce the appearance of volume and coloration found in fruit paintings. The same process was critical to reproduce multiples of patented technological inventions. Lithographic techniques were applied to depictions of the organic long before patents for living organisms existed and specified intellectual property protection in living things. As described at length in other publications by Kevles, this development happened during the emerging age of biotechnology when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, that “whether an innovation is alive or not is irrelevant to its patentability” [2].

Historian William Rankin recounts that, toward the end of the 1860s, the requirements for color drawings and models in the patent system changed to black and white ink drawings. The Patent Act Amendment of 1861 called for multiple copies of each patent—something unavailable until photolithography. By 1870, the patent office had to provide copies to libraries, along with the public, that inexpensive photolithography made possible. The highly prized asset of each species of fruit was its flavor, which could not be captured by any reproduction. Nevertheless, chromo-lithography situated apples and other fruit as treasures within the cultural context and as commodities within a socioeconomic framework built from patented inventions. Claims of propriety were essential to their commercial viability.

Applicants for fruit patents had to submit colored drawings of their products. The ensuing reproductions enabled by lithography mark a pivotal change from a horticulture that depended on senses of tactility and smell to one reliant on the copy. You can think of the relationship that exists between fine artworks (the original watercolors) and patent drawings as a kind...