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vii DIR ECTOR’S FOR EWOR D 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 past. Among the special strengths of the collections are tavern signs, furniture, portraits, manuscripts, costumes and textiles, and vast holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. With more than 235,000 items, graphics constitutes the largest of the collections, after books and manuscripts. Over the years, these collections have been written about in the Connecticut Historical Society’s annual Collections (1860–1967) and quarterly Bulletin (1934–1995) and promoted through in-house and occasional traveling exhibitions. However, they have only recently begun to receive the popular and scholarly attention they merit. Picturing Victorian America is the third in a series of book-length publications featuring the most important collections of the Connecticut Historical Society. Like its predecessors (Lions & Eagles & Bulls: Early American Tavern & Inn Signs, 2000, and Connecticut Valley Furniture, 2005), the present volume seeks not only to provide readers with a comprehensive catalog of the Historical Society’s holdings, but also to place these holdings in their artistic, social, and historical context. These books are intended to serve as useful reference tools and to help inspire and nurture a lifelong interest in history. My own interest in these mid–nineteenth century printmakers began when I joined the Connecticut Historical Society staff in 1981. When I first walked into the basement room that housed the prints and photographs, the collection was stacked on tables and stored in boxes, frames, and file cabinets of various sizes. I was hired to create order and build a print room, a place where visitors could easily find the pictures they wanted within a collection that was professionally organized and cataloged. I had the good fortune to assume the job of prints and photographs curator from Melancthon “Chick” Jacobus, a courtly man in his seventies, a former soccer coach and English teacher at a local private school, whose passion for Connecticut River Valley steamboats, Connecticut railroads, and the history of Hartford streets was complemented by my total ignorance of all of those subjects. But I did know about prints and printing history. It took me a while to tackle the contents of a row of gray flat files—at least eighty drawers —each labeled in Chick’s distinctive, clear handwriting: “Accidents and Close Calls,” “Fruit and Flowers” (this included prints of women wearing bloomers), “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and other delightfully descriptive but decidedly unsystematic categories. These drawers contained the Connecticut Historical Society’s unparalleled collection of Kellogg lithographs . Over the next few years I came to appreciate the Kellogg brothers as artists, businessmen , collaborators, advertisers, book publishers, and participants in one of America’s most important visual culture revolutions—the rise of the inexpensive, wildly popular, mass-marketed lithograph. The Kellogg collection at the Connecticut Historical Society originated in the 1840s, with gifts from the Kelloggs themselves. Elijah and Edmund Kellogg gave a number of prints to the Historical Society when it was located at 124 Main Street, Hartford, a few doors north of their shop at 136 Main Street. In the early 1850s, soon after the Connecticut Historical viii  d i r e c t o r ’s f o r e w o r d Society moved to new quarters in what is today the Wadsworth Atheneum building, the artists Titus Darrow and Joseph Ropes donated several Kellogg lithographs based on their own designs. Then for many years Kellogg prints were not actively donated or purchased. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Kellogg collection began to achieve significance as well as mass when Samuel St. John Morgan, a great grandson of Elijah Kellogg, donated hundreds of prints. Additional gifts during this period were received from legendary Connecticut antiquarians Avis and Rockwell Gardner and William Lamson Warren, in addition to the Old Print Shop and others. In 1952, the Connecticut Historical Society produced an exhibition and published a brochure, Kellogg Prints: An Exhibition of the Work of J. G., D. W., E. B., and E. C. Kellogg, Hartford, Lithographers, 1830–1866, Predecessors of Kellogg and Bulkeley. When in the 1980s I asked for details about this exhibition, the director, Thompson R. Harlow , replied with his usual modesty, “Oh, we just pinned some prints to the walls.” As I...

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