Communications - Overview
Tools of communication have transformed American society time and again over the past two centuries. The Museum has preserved many instruments of these changes, from printing presses to personal digital assistants.
The collections include hundreds of artifacts from the printing trade and related fields, including papermaking equipment, wood and metal type collections, bookbinding tools, and typesetting machines. Benjamin Franklin is said to have used one of the printing presses in the collection in 1726.
More than 7,000 objects chart the evolution of electronic communications, including the original telegraph of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell's early telephones. Radios, televisions, tape recorders, and the tools of the computer age are part of the collections, along with wireless phones and a satellite tracking system.
"Communications - Overview" showing 27 items.
Page 1 of 3
The Bonapartes at an Inn
- Description
- Gerome Ferris recorded his painting The Bonapartes, 1804 in detail in this ink drawing. We do not know whether he made the drawing before the painting as a guide or afterward as a record, and the current location of the painting is unknown. In any case, he would have researched the historic details in depth to ensure his picture was accurate. He took pride in his chosen calling, painter-historian, which he seriously pursued from about 1900.
- The drawing shows Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother, and his American wife, Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore, at an inn during their travels in the United States. Jerome Bonaparte had taken refuge here during the Napoleonic Wars and married during his stay in this country. A furious Napoleon rejected Jerome’s American wife, who returned to the United States. Jerome married again to support his brother’s dynastic ambition.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- original artist
- Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
- ID Number
- GA*16616
- catalog number
- 16616
- accession number
- 119780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Marguerite of Anjou
- Description
- Christian Schussele, Alsatian émigré; painter and friend of Stephen Ferris, presented this watercolor design for the title page of Jacob Abbott’s book Margaret of Anjou to Ferris in 1858. The book appeared in 1861. Ferris was a student of Schussele’s, and Ferris’s son, Gerome, also studied briefly with Schussele at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before Schussele’s death in August 1879.
- Margaret of Anjou was the wife of Henry VI of England and virtually ruled the country during her husband’s frequent bouts of insanity. Her policies have sometimes been blamed for the Wars of the Roses, which convulsed England for many years during the fifteenth century.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- original artist
- Schussele, Christian
- ID Number
- GA*16640
- catalog number
- 16640
- accession number
- 119780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Curator of the Alhambra
- Description
- Stephen Ferris made this pencil sketch of a distinguished, pensive older man he called the “Curator of the Alhambra” during his two-month stay in Granada, Spain, in 1881. A watercolor in the NMAH Ferris Collection of an almost identical gentleman is identified as the “Keeper of the Tore de la Vela,” the watchtower of the fortified citadel in the Alhambra complex. While Ferris, a portrait artist, was exploring the wonders of the Alhambra, he was also busy sketching people he met.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16683
- accession number
- 119780
- catalog number
- GA*16683
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Donkey Shearing
- Description
- Gerome Ferris made this ink drawing Donkey Shearing, Seville in 1882, a subject he had observed while on a trip to southern Spain with his father. The drawing demonstrates a sure hand. After beginning his art study with his father, Gerome continued at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1879.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- 1882
- original artist
- Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
- ID Number
- GA*16622.02
- catalog number
- 16622.02
- accession number
- 119780
- 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 Elizabeth Moran Ferris
- Description
- Stephen Ferris drew this pencil portrait of his wife, Elizabeth Anastasia Moran Ferris, in 1878. Ferris probably met Elizabeth through his friendship with her brothers, artists Thomas and Peter Moran. The couple married in 1862. Their son, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, a history painter and etcher, was born in 1863 and their daughter, May Electa Ferris, a landscape painter and etcher, in 1871.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1878
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16649
- catalog number
- GA*16649
- accession number
- 119,780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Annette Ryder Ferris
- Description
- Stephen Ferris made this pencil portrait of his son Gerome’s new wife, Annette Ryder Ferris, in 1894. They were married in May of that year. Mrs. Ferris later donated prints, drawings, and photographs that had belonged to her father-in-law and her husband to the Smithsonian in 1932. Gerome Ferris had made an initial donation in 1927.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1894
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16651
- catalog number
- GA*16651
- accession number
- 119,780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Gerome Ferris
- Description
- Stephen Ferris drew this pencil portrait of his son Gerome as a Christmas present for his new daughter-in-law, Annette Ryder Ferris, in 1894. Gerome and Annette were married in May of that year.
- In 1927 Gerome Ferris made the first donation to the Smithsonian of prints, drawings, and photographs that he and his father had collected, and his widow made a second donation in 1932.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- Christmas, 1894
- 1894
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16656
- catalog number
- GA*16656
- accession number
- 119780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Thomas Moran
- Description
- In 1876 Stephen Ferris made several pencil studies, showing his brother-in-law, artist Thomas Moran. The two men had known each other before Ferris’s marriage to Moran’s sister, Elizabeth Anastasia Moran, in 1862. Ferris had arrived in Philadelphia in 1856 and was recorded in 1861 as sharing a studio with Thomas Moran and Samuel Sartain, whose father, John Sartain, demonstrated the technique of etching for Moran and Ferris.
- Thomas Moran’s etched work and that of his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, is well represented in the NMAH Graphic Arts collection. A number of their prints came as gifts from the Ferris family.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1876
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16662
- catalog number
- GA*16662
- accession number
- 119,780
- 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
- Next Page