Art - Overview
The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 111 items.
Page 1 of 12
Christopher Columbus Dying
- Description
- Sixteen-year-old Gerome Ferris etched this print in 1879 after his own painting of the dying Christopher Columbus, 1506 Last Days of C. Columbus at Vallodolid. The current location of the painting is unknown, but the choice of topic anticipates Gerome’s future as a history painter, focusing on American narrative subjects.
- After death, Christopher Columbus’s journeys were not over. His remains traveled from Vallodolid to Seville and in 1542 were taken to the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, colonized by Columbus after 1492. After a move to Havana, Cuba, they returned to Seville cathedral in 1898 where they are today.
- The etching was printed on chine-collé, a very thin sheet of paper that accepts the image in passing through the press with a heavier sheet of backing paper to which is it glued during the printing.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1879
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
- ID Number
- GA*14450
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14450
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Locomotion, Plate 55 "Walking, Turning Around, Action of Aversion"
- Description
- Eadweard Muybridge's cyanotypes are working proofs (contact prints) made from the more than 20,000 negatives he took at the University of Pennsylvania from 1884 to 1886. There Muybridge photographed human and animal subjects in motion from lateral (parallel), front, and rear positions. For the lateral views he used up to 36 lenses in 12 to 24 cameras placed at 90-degree angles to his subjects. Muybridge added two more cameras, each holding up to 12 lenses and placed at 60-degree angles, for the front and rear "foreshortening" views.
- Since the original negatives no longer exist, the cyanotypes record complete images before Muybridge edited and cropped them for publication. The mounted cyanotypes for plate 55 represent one of over 750 sets of proofs in this unique collection of early photography of motion at the Smithsonian. Comparisons between Muybridge's working cyanotype proofs and his final collotype prints prove that he freely reprinted, cropped, deleted, or substituted negatives to make the assemblage of 781 collotype in the portfolio "Animal Locomotion".
- In plate 55, frame 3 of the rear views is blank and crossed out, indicating a camera malfunction. The remaining 11 frames were reassembled and renumbered for the final print.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1885-07-28
- maker
- Muybridge, Eadweard
- ID Number
- PG*3856.0049
- accession number
- 98473
- catalog number
- 3856.0049
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Jean-Léon Gérôme
- Description
- Stephen Ferris etched a dapper J. L. Gérôme (1824–1904) in 1899, near the end of Gérôme’s very successful career as painter and sculptor. Ferris had admired the French artist’s work for many years, at least since 1863 when he named his son after him. Although Ferris never actually met Gérôme, the two artists had corresponded. For this print Ferris used a photograph he had received from Gérôme. He then sent Gérôme trial proofs for comments and requested a signature to include in the final impressions, which appears here at lower left.
- Gérôme congratulated Ferris on the portrait as “work done with great care and great talent—the effect is very good and very firm. If I had any criticism to make, I would reserve it for the background, which is a little too even, and for the clothing, which has a little softness in the execution.” Gérôme also suggested that the highlight on the order which appears on his left breast and is not particularly noticeable in the photograph, be less bright. The order remains brightly lit, possibly Ferris’s tribute to Gérôme.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1879
- date made
- 1899
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14396.01
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14396.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Roman Chariot Race
- Description
- Stephen Ferris collaborated with his brother-in-law Peter Moran in 1875 to make this large 22 x 57cm reproductive etching of Alexander von Wagner’s stirring painting Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus, Rome in the Presence of the Emperor Domitian. The scale of the etching required an oversized copper plate, which was difficult to find. Ferris and Moran fabricated one from the bottom of a copper boiler. According to one source, Moran, who would later specialize in farm animals, etched the horses, the archway in the background, and the roadway. Ferris, later known for his portraits, etched the figures and the rest of the architecture. At the time this etching was one of the largest made in the United States. The print was well received; the New York Times noted: “Of the style of execution we can speak only in the highest terms.”
- Alexander von Wagner (1838–1919), a Hungarian artist active in Germany, also enjoyed considerable success when he exhibited the painting Chariot Race in Europe in 1872. Wagner painted other versions; one was shown to critical acclaim at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. The Manchester Art Gallery in England owns a version, which may be seen on its website. It was not unusual at that time for an artist to paint several replicas of a popular subject in different sizes.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1882
- 1875
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- original artist
- Wagner
- graphic artist
- Moran, Peter
- publisher
- J. C. McCurdy & Co.
- ID Number
- GA*14534
- catalog number
- 14534
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Mariano Fortuny
- Description
- This profile portrait of Spanish painter and graphic artist Mariano Fortuny is one of two in the NMAH collection that Stephen Ferris made in 1875, soon after Fortuny’s untimely death at age thirty-six in Rome, Italy, on November 21, 1874.
- Gerome Ferris, in a note on the mount, refers to the print as an etching on glass. According to a contemporary, Stephen Ferris “was one of the first artists to practice etching on glass as it was miscalled at the time.” The cliché-verre process, as it known today, originated in France in the nineteenth century. The artist coats a glass plate with an opaque substance and then draws an image on it with a pointed instrument such as an etching needle. He then lays the plate image-side down on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposes it to light.
- This print and a second portrait of Fortuny by Ferris were the only two American etched portraits shown in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The revival of interest in etching that began in Europe during the 1860s did not really take off in the United States until about 1880, but visitors to the exhibition saw a modest number of American etchings at the beginning of the movement.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1873
- 1875
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14552
- catalog number
- 14552
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Electa Kinney Ferris
- Description
- Stephen Ferris made this pencil portrait of his mother, Electa Kinney Ferris, from memory in 1890. She had died in 1848 near Yorkville, Illinois, after the birth of her fourteenth child, when Ferris was a boy of thirteen. (The family had moved to Illinois shortly after Ferris was born in New York State.) Contrary to a contemporary biography’s claim that he was orphaned at ten, Ferris belonged to a large family, which became even larger with his father’s remarriage. Later a maternal uncle with whom Ferris was living offered the seventeen-year-old youth a chance to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
- date made
- 1898
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16646
- catalog number
- 16646
- accession number
- 119780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of a Moor
- Description
- The 1876 Centennial Exposition brought people and exhibits from around the world to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Stephen Ferris, a resident of the city, visited the site on August 7 and recorded in pencil the face of this man, whom he called Maure [Moor]. The man may have been one of the workers associated with an exhibit from Tunisia or Morocco. Ferris was very interested in North African subject matter at this time, due to his fondness for the works of Mariano Fortuny.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1876
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16664
- catalog number
- GA*16664
- accession number
- 119,780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Engraved woodblock of hand signs for the letters 'S' through 'Y'
- Description
- This engraved woodblock shows hand signs for the letters "S" through "Y." The illustration was used in a publication relating to the gesture-signs and signals of the North American Indians by Garrick Mallery; it was prepared and printed by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. for the Bureau of American Ethnology in about 1880.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1880
- publisher
- Bureau of American Ethnology
- printer
- Government Printing Office
- author
- Mallery, Garrick
- block maker
- Grottenthaler, V.
- ID Number
- 1980.0219.1368
- catalog number
- 1980.0219.1368
- accession number
- 1980.0219
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Engraved woodblock of a "Canoe burial"
- Description
- This engraved woodblock of a “Canoe Burial” was prepared by Henry Hobart Nichols (1838-1887) and the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the image was published as Figure 23 on page 171 in an article by H.C. Yarrow (1871-1876) entitled “Mortuary Customs of North American Indians” in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, 1879-80.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- publisher
- Bureau of American Ethnology
- printer
- Government Printing Office
- graphic artist
- Nichols, H. H.
- author
- Yarrow, Harry Crecy
- block maker
- Grottenthaler, V.
- ID Number
- 1980.0219.1510
- catalog number
- 1980.0219.1510
- accession number
- 1980.0219
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Engraved woodblock of the "Signal for 'buffalo discovered'"
- Description
- This engraved woodblock of “Signal for ‘buffalo discovered’” was prepared by Henry Hobart Nichols (1838-1887) and the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.; the image was published as Figure 337 on page 532 in an article by Garrick Mallery (1831-1894) entitled “Sign Language Among the North American Indians” in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian, 1879-80.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- publisher
- Bureau of American Ethnology
- printer
- Government Printing Office
- maker
- Nichols, H. H.
- author
- Mallery, Garrick
- ID Number
- 1980.0219.1523
- accession number
- 1980.0219
- catalog number
- 1980.0219.1523
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center