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85 8 Sail and Steam on Stone: Maritime Prints of the Kelloggs richard c. malley  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 along the populous eastern seaboard, both eyes were very much focused on the present. That the Kelloggs produced prints of maritime subjects is no surprise. The nation’s earliest history was closely linked to the sea, from the age of exploration through European settlement. Two wars for independence had been waged in part on the sea, and the benefits of seaborne commerce were obvious to most. The four decades after the War of 1812 have been considered the golden age of American maritime enterprise. Even tidewater cities like Hartford, Connecticut, with its long-established connections to Atlantic, Gulf, and West Indian ports, profited from this expansion of commerce. Until the development of a railroad system in the 1850s, the products of the Kelloggs’ presses traveled primarily by water to American markets in the South and West. Colchester, where the four Kellogg brothers were raised, was a farming community southeast of Hartford, with considerable economic ties to ports on both the Connecticut and Thames Rivers.1 Geographically and psychologically, the Kelloggs were never very far from navigable waters, and at least two of the brothers enjoyed firsthand knowledge of the Atlantic maritime world: Edmund Kellogg worked first as a boy in the thriving port of New London, the center of Connecticut’s whaling industry, and again in the early 1830s in the nearby port town of Stonington, Connecticut. Elijah Kellogg made two transatlantic roundtrip crossings, at least one aboard a sailing packet ship.2 Maritime art in nineteenth-century America tended toward one of two distinct forms: seascapes, a variant of landscape painting; and documentary vessel portraiture, which could also include depictions of specific events. The majority of the Kelloggs’ maritime prints fall into the latter category and focus primarily on maritime commerce and naval matters. Miscellaneous subjects include sentimental portraits of mariners, yachting, and port views. As was common among printmakers, some specific titles were reissued at different times. In certain cases the original imagery was changed to various degrees, resulting in a distinctly different print. The importance to America’s economy of merchant sailing vessels, the unheralded eighteen-wheelers of their day, was recognized by the Kelloggs, and they issued at least a half-dozen prints focusing on these workaday craft, as well as their globe-girdling cousins, whaling vessels. American Whaler, published by E. C. Kellogg about 1851 (fig. 96; cat. no. 86  r i c h a r d c . m a l l e y 16), spotlighted one of the nation’s leading maritime industries. The technical details of the whaleship, its individual whaleboats, and gear are quite accurate. The scene is thought to be based on a painting by French marine artist Louis LeBreton (1818–1866).3 Much as the History Channel series Deadliest Catch informs twenty-first-century viewers that commercial fishing is an incredibly risky occupation, so too Dangers of the Whale Fishery published by D. W. Kellogg & Co. in the 1830s reminded Americans that oil for their lamps did not come without great personal risk on the whale man’s part.4 Companion images titled Outward Bound and Homeward Bound, possibly based on works by the father–son team of British marine artists Miles and Samuel Walters, celebrated the work of merchant seamen.5 One of the firm’s best merchant maritime prints is the aptly named Merchant Ships, published by E .C. Kellogg in the early 1850s (fig. 97; cat. no. 606). In it, a wide range of sailing vessels representing an older technology, from large three-masted ship to humble sloop, are portrayed close to shore, with two mariners gesturing to well-dressed spectators on the beach, as if reminding them of the importance of their occupation. Partially hidden by one of the sailing vessels lurks a new technology in the form of a steamer, symbolically waiting its turn to replace sail as the prime means of marine propulsion. The pace of technological change increased markedly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among the most obvious arenas of this transformation was transportation. Steam propulsion took to the waters early in...

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