The Ferris Collection of Prints

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.

More about the collection
More about the artists

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.
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
Gerome Ferris thought enough of this etching, Grandma Moran, of his maternal grandmother, Mary Higson Moran, that he exhibited it in 1880 at the annual show of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was enrolled as a student.
Description
Gerome Ferris thought enough of this etching, Grandma Moran, of his maternal grandmother, Mary Higson Moran, that he exhibited it in 1880 at the annual show of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was enrolled as a student. He made the print in 1879 after an 1876 pencil sketch by his father, Stephen Ferris, who had taught him to etch.
Mary Moran was the mother of artists Peter, Edward, John, and Thomas Moran, brothers of Elizabeth Moran Ferris.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1879
graphic artist
Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
ID Number
GA.14435.01
accession number
94830
catalog number
14435.01
Given his father’s interest in North African subjects painted by artists like Mariano Fortuny, it is not surprising that the region inspired young Gerome Ferris’s 1877 etching Arab Snake Charmer. Fourteen-year-old Gerome learned to etch from his father.
Description
Given his father’s interest in North African subjects painted by artists like Mariano Fortuny, it is not surprising that the region inspired young Gerome Ferris’s 1877 etching Arab Snake Charmer. Fourteen-year-old Gerome learned to etch from his father. He later entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of sixteen.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1877
graphic artist
Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
ID Number
GA.14438.03
accession number
94830
catalog number
14438.03
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.
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
Gerome Ferris etched this print after French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s (1825–1905) New Born Lamb, painted in 1873. Ferris’s print appeared in the catalog for the 1887 New York auction of the A. T.
Description
Gerome Ferris etched this print after French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s (1825–1905) New Born Lamb, painted in 1873. Ferris’s print appeared in the catalog for the 1887 New York auction of the A. T. Stewart collection, as a reproductive etching advertising the painting for sale.
Gerome Ferris had studied with Bouguereau in Paris in 1884 at the Académie Julian, a co-ed art school with no entrance exams and low fees. An academic-style painter, Bouguereau’s work was highly regarded in his day.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1887
original artist
Bouguereau, William-Adolphe
graphic artist
Ferris, Jean Leon Gerome
ID Number
GA.14560
catalog number
14560
accession number
94830
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.
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. He 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
Gerome Ferris made this ink drawing in 1882 while on a trip to southern Spain with his father. The drawing demonstrates a sure hand.Currently not on view
Description
Gerome Ferris made this ink drawing in 1882 while on a trip to southern Spain with his father. The drawing demonstrates a sure hand.
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

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