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

This impression of La Recureuse by Charles Jacque is neither signed nor dated. The print shows a farm girl washing a large tub, which has been propped up on a rustic stool or wooden chopping block.
Description
This impression of La Recureuse by Charles Jacque is neither signed nor dated. The print shows a farm girl washing a large tub, which has been propped up on a rustic stool or wooden chopping block. The young boy, standing and carrying a shield, originally was shown relieving himself. A later hand, possibly Stephen Ferris’s or Gerome Ferris’s, censored the artist’s composition by whiting out the original activity and inking in a shield. Printed on chine colle.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1845
graphic artist
Jacque, Charles Émile
ID Number
GA.14705
catalog number
14705
accession number
94830
This print, On the Neshimaney, which shows cows on a still, warm afternoon standing by a creek, is typical of the views of rural Pennsylvania that were the specialty of Peter Moran. He took pains to make the landscape details appear natural.
Description
This print, On the Neshimaney, which shows cows on a still, warm afternoon standing by a creek, is typical of the views of rural Pennsylvania that were the specialty of Peter Moran. He took pains to make the landscape details appear natural. French artists who depicted the rural landscape, such as Constant Tryon (1810–1865) and Charles Jacque (1813–1894), were important to Moran’s artistic development.
Somewhat confusingly, Peter Moran exhibited three etchings with the title On the Neshaminey in his one-man show in 1887 and 1888 at Frederick Keppel’s New York gallery. This print is the largest and last of the Neshaminey series. Philadelphia book dealer Robert M. Lindsay commissioned the print from Moran and published it in an edition of 100 in late October 1886.
This print is signed in the image and in pencil at lower left below the image, “P Moran.” It also has a remarque (small design) of a cow’s head at left in the lower margin. Remarques are of special interest to collectors as they are used on prepublication prints and then removed from the plate before the edition is printed.
The Neshaminey Creek in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, runs north of Philadelphia through what are today mostly suburban areas, although some farmland does remain. The area shown in the print is probably near either New Britain or Edison. Peter Moran and his family spent some summers in the area.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1886
graphic artist
Moran, Peter
publisher
Lindsay, Robert
ID Number
GA.14769
catalog number
14769
accession number
94830
Christian Adolf Schreyer (1828–1899) painted this dramatic scene of galloping horses pulling a wagon through the Wallachian countryside (now part of Romania).
Description
Christian Adolf Schreyer (1828–1899) painted this dramatic scene of galloping horses pulling a wagon through the Wallachian countryside (now part of Romania). William Unger’s etching, made about 1880, was selected for exhibition at the Cincinnati Exposition in 1888 in an enormous display of past and present graphic art curated by Sylvester R. Koehler, the Smithsonian’s Graphic Arts Curator. Koehler was also a prolific author, editor, and advocate of contemporary etching. He published Unger’s etchings in Foreign Etchings (1887) and in his journal, The American Art Review.
Schreyer’s paintings of horses and peasant life remain popular today. The Chase, his painting showing Arab horsemen dashing through a field, sold for $464,000 in 2005.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1880
original artist
Schreyer, Adolf
graphic artist
Unger, William
publisher
Kaeser, P.
printer
Kargl, F.
ID Number
GA.14981
catalog number
14981
accession number
94830

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