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18 2 From the Burin of an American Artist” ARTISTIC PRODUCTION IN THE 1830S AND 1840S In his “Editor’s Table” for the March 1839 issue of his magazine, Louis A. Godey promises to offer his fair readers, besides the monthly color fashion plate, “a beautiful engraving on steel,” either a portrait, landscape, or historical subject. Then, in a special column entitled “OUR PLATES” published two months later in the May issue, he promises that these steel engravings will be “always from the burin of an American artist.” Additionally, he notes his plans to provide two extra steel plates each year, of either an American landscape, or “some celebrated literary character,” observing that this will bring the total to “TWENTY SIX Engravings on Steel in a year, besides Wood Cuts of the finest kind, Embroidery and Music.” Godey also uses this column as an opportunity to remind his readers of the costs incurred to bring them these plates, and urges them to pay their subscriptions. In return, he promises them “several original pictures from our own collection” to be engraved on steel in the year ahead. In August 1839, Godey boldly informs his readers that he employs twenty “lady colourists” year-round at a cost of three thousand dollars, just to color his fashion plates. In the same column devoted to “PLATES OF FASHION,” he also sniffs disparagingly at the uncolored wood fashion plates offered by a “contemporary,” and announces he will demonstrate the difference by offering two fashion plates in the September issue, one colored and one uncolored, so that his readers can compare. By the opening of the decade of the 1840s, Louis Godey’s magazine was the leading illustrated monthly of the era.1 As noted in the previous chapter , Godey had launched his magazine a decade earlier, eventually buying “ ARTISTIC PRODUCTION IN THE 1830S AND 1840S 19 out a smaller Boston rival, the Ladies’ Magazine, and absorbing editor Sarah Josepha Hale into the purchase. Hale, widowed in 1822 with five children to support, had launched her Ladies’ Magazine in 1828, two years before Godey. No fan of the fashion plates that Godey knew his readers prized, Hale maintained a steadfast commitment to the literary matter in the magazine, using her editorial pen tirelessly to promote women’s education. With her eyes firmly on the literary matter, Godey could indulge his interest in American art. Godey’s interest in obtaining the best in American art for his magazine’s embellishments helped to promote the work of a growing number of fledgling American artists and engravers. As Wendy Wick Reaves points out, art historians have tended to neglect or denigrate “pictorial material of this type” because it was traditionally held to be “commercial art, a popular art, and frequently a derivative art” (Reaves speaksspecificallyhereofportraitprints).However,Reavescontinues,“these pictures must not be overlooked as legitimate works of art” because they were “considered as such in their own time.”2 The artists, engravers, designers , and publishers of the Philadelphia pictorials understood the embellishments prepared for the magazines as uniquely “American art” forms, and this chapter and subsequent ones treat them as such. The consumers of these images also treated them as art. As Lawrence Levine and Alan Wallach have argued, before the Civil War American consumers failed to make the distinctions between “high” and “low” art that would be institutionalized in the twentieth century.3 In the 1840s, for the first time in our nation’s history, American artists produced and distributed, via the embellishments offered in the Philadelphia pictorials, art intended for a widespread middlebrow audience. These magazines thus serve as a fruitful site for studying the production, promotion, and consumption of cultural artifacts that served as markers of class affiliation as well. In this and subsequent chapters, I make several interrelated claims. First, I argue that the periodicals served as an important vehicle for the widespread distribution of American art—in conjunction with, yet surpassing in importance , the Art-Unions, the gift books, the annuals, illustrated books, exhibitions , and art and print galleries, just to name the most obvious corollary distribution sites. I also assert that the periodicals encouraged the production of a uniquely American art—by commissioning original art works directly for the magazines. Because the artists and engravers contributing to these periodicals aspired to middle-class comfort, they frequently adapted their artistic skills to a variety of genres and media—concerned less with critical reception of their work...

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