thompson john wrigley dewey dellon (1 resultados)

Oblong 8vo. (5 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches). 94 pomological and horticultural plates with captions on card. 92 plates by Thompson, 1 by Dewey, 1 without imprint. 50 of fruit, 35 of flowers, 9 of trees and shrubbery. 85 of the plates are made with the pochoir or "theorum" method of using stencils without line and then hand-detailing with watercolor and tint. 9 of the plates are chromolithographs. The vast majority of the plates have letterpress captions, but some are seen with lithographed captions. A few have shaved imprints and one is bound in reverse. Original dark brown full morocco, paneled in gilt with a roll-tool on front board and in blind on back, expertly rebacked, declasped, with brown and red stone-pattern marbled endpapers "An innovation in American popular art," this album of hand-colored plates of fruits, flowers, and trees was used by a 19th-century nurseryman to sell his wares. A gorgeous, unique seed catalog in its original binding. [Ravenswaay] "The patter should start 'I do not wish to intrude upon your valuable time, but I have with me a work of art in form of a book.'" - D. M. Dewey, Tree Agents' Private Guide (1875) This album, made for the use of a traveling nurseryman in selling his stock, is an evocative piece of American vernacular art from the 1870s. Itinerant "seed merchants" or "tree peddlers" sold plants from nurseries they represented to farmers and gardeners in the territories they visited, enticing customers with tantalizing paintings of their produce. Their sample-books, like the present example, were made to order, each binding-in different individual plates, and often these plates were swapped out and changed as the seasons changed too. "Virtually every album is unique in its makeup." [Reese] The 94 plates in this seed salesman's catalog comprise 50 fruit plates including 16 of apples, 8 of pears, and numerous peaches, grapes, plums, currants, and berries; 35 beautiful flower plates including roses, wisteria, althea, hydrangea, lilies, and honeysuckle; and 9 verdant tree and shrub plates, showing Judas's tree, weeping willow, weeping linden, and spruce. Every plate is captioned with the plant's common name, and nearly all state properties specific to each plant, ranging from its durability to its ideal season to its taste. These "painted nurseryman's plates were more akin to folk painting than to commercial art of their time," and are fascinating American folk-art objects, of equal interest to the historian of the development of color-printing as to the historian of American pomology. [Ravenswaay] J. W. Thompson and Co., which produced 92 of the 94 plates in the present album, was a printing company active in Rochester, New York, from 1876 to 1891. Thompson himself was one of the most successful of the nineteenth-century nurserymen printers from Rochester, New York, the so-called "Flower City." In the mid-to-late 1800s, a great number of nursery firms were located in Rochester, and in service of that thriving industry, the Flower City also became the center of horticultural publishing. An 1876 advertisement for Thompson's business differentiated him from the crowd: "We are prepared to manufacture first class plates for nurserymen, twenty percent less than any other establishments in town, and fully equal, if not superior in quality." Thompson used "the technique of theorem paintings colored with the help of stencils used to multiply the number of copies as quickly and as cheaply as possible." [Oak Spring Pomona] Thompson was especially known for his skill: "hand-colored plates, with or without printed outlines, were a speciality of the Thompson Company in the 1870s." This album's first 85 plates on card were painted using this "theorem" process, more commonly referred to as pochoir, which uses stencils and renders bright, light, and soft images redolent of watercolor. Once stenciled, these 85 plates were then detailed by hand in watercolor and heightened with white tint. The last 9 plates in the album are early.