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27 3 Family Values and Victorian Virtues in Kellogg Prints of Home and Family kate steinway  Twenty-five years before Leo Tolstoy opened his novel Anna Karenina with the famous line “Happy families are all alike,”1 the Kellogg firm in Hartford, Connecticut, was busy turning out numerous prints of happy families—all alike in featuring cozy married couples, ensconced in comfortable homes, surrounded by dutiful, well-behaved, respectful children and obedient pets. 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 The conjured images are so embedded in the American cultural imagination that while the details and trappings depicted in the prints seem quaint, the responsibilities and behaviors —of husband, wife, and children—still shape social norms. Even today it is rare to find images in cultural media—television, magazines, or the Internet—that picture family life and gender roles as different from the images that circulated in mid-Victorian America.3 Kellogg prints of families and children actively transmitted social values. As popular prints, they reinforced cultural ideas and delivered them through artistically conventional compositions and perspective, often gracefully rendered and colored. Framed on walls, placed in folios to be brought out on occasion, or given to praiseworthy students, the prints span the centuries as testimony to the way ideals of the time were delivered and cemented in people’s imaginations and expectations. What perfect family life these prints depict! The 1850 print Married (fig. 28; cat. no. 585) portrays an intimacy and equality between man and wife that is evidence of the growing midcentury respect for a woman’s sphere within her home as well as the belief that emotional ties usefully bind man and wife.4 The couple exchange an intimate and affectionate gaze, two equals within the family circle. The composition is bisected: the realm of women on one side (girl, doll, baby, mother), the realm of men on the other (boy, ball, father). The two realms are separate yet interdependent, held together not only by the gaze, but compositionally by repeated gestures and by the balanced and skillfully applied coloring of this impression of the print.5 To add to the poignancy, a partial view of a framed painting or print hangs behind the husband. It shows an old hunched and lonely male figure passing a barren tree, a subtle reminder of the fate ahead for those men who do not submit to this vision of marital happiness.6 Married was one of a pair. Single (fig. 27; cat. no. 840) shows the same man holding the lithograph Married on his lap as he stares contemplatively into a crackling fire. The Kelloggs were effective storytellers, and details, especially in their print pairs, must have been 28  k a t e s t e i n wa y a delight to the mid-Victorian eye and mind. In this print, a landscape also decorates the wall, but through its symbolism we know this man’s lonely fate is not yet sealed, because the trees are young and the figure of the lonely old walking man is momentarily and suspensefully obscured by a fold of the curtain. Perhaps the man is summoning the courage for a marriage proposal—a proposal that once accepted will lead to the flourishing relationship depicted in Married. Five years later, another version of Married (fig. 26; cat. no. 586) sets a similar scene. An adoring, beautiful wife serenely holds her bundled baby while gazing at her handsome husband, who studies his newspaper. He is an ideal 1855 husband and father, the bridge between the world outside and the well-appointed world inside the home. His children—each an image of appreciative, studious, and helpful behavior—and his wife, as well as their perfectly tucked in and rounded cat, are safe and protected by the husband and by God, symbolized by the cross the wife wears and the framed reproduction of Raphael’s Madonna and Child on the wall. While the whole vision might not be attainable to the average 1850s print consumer, parts could be: the Kelloggs printed and sold reproductions of this same Raphael Madonna, which nineteenth-century purchasers could have hung on their on own walls in emulation of this ideal nineteenth-century home (see fig. 2; cat. nos. 955, 956). Not only...

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