The Ferris Collection of Prints - Introduction
The Museum’s Graphic Arts Collection, the oldest print-collecting unit in the Smithsonian, focuses on the technical and social history of printmaking to document how prints are made and used. Smithsonian art museums collect works on paper selected for aesthetic reasons, but the National Museum of American History (formerly the Museum of History and Technology) takes a broad view of visual culture.
Our prints illustrate technical developments and cultural changes. They represent all kinds of graphic works that have influenced American society. The collection has always included examples from many periods and countries, fine-art prints as well as popular and commercial graphic art, together with the plates, blocks, and tools used to produce prints. In 1996 the Museum presented an exhibition on 150 years of Smithsonian print collecting, Building a National Collection.
One of the largest print collections ever received by the Smithsonian was donated by the Ferris family between 1927 and 1932. Stephen James Ferris (1835–1915), a Philadelphia painter and etcher, collected over 2,000 European and American prints, both reproductive and original, representing old master and contemporary printmakers. The collection incorporated a variety of artistic subjects, compositions, and styles. Ferris may well have mined it for inspiration for his own work, but he was also deeply interested in art for its own sake. He and his family and friends would have simply enjoyed studying the images.
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"The Ferris Collection of Prints - Introduction" showing 6 items.
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
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
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
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 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 Gerome Ferris
- Description
- Stephen Ferris sketched his sleeping four-year-old son Gerome in October 1867. He used this pencil drawing as a model for the sleeping child in his painting Grandma’s Spinning Wheel, also completed in 1867. At a later date, Gerome Ferris came across this sketch and noted in pencil: “I have seen no drawing better than this past or present JLGF," but, of course, he was the subject and possibly prejudiced
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1867
- 1867-10-24
- depicted (sitter)
- Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
- original artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*16653
- catalog number
- GA*16653
- accession number
- 119780
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center