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 12 items.
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S. J. Ferris Self-portrait
- Description
- The Philadelphia Society of Etchers commissioned this self-portrait of Stephen James Ferris in 1880. Ferris was a founding member of the society, which formed the same year, three years after the founding of New York Etching Club, the first in the United States. Ferris had seen the etching process demonstrated in 1860 by John Sartain, an engraver. In 1875 Ferris produced one of his earliest etchings to be commercially published in the United States, a portrait of Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1880
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14388
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14388
- 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
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 William Baker
- Description
- Stephen Ferris etched the portrait of distinguished Philadelphian William Spohn Baker in 1882. Baker (1824–1897), a critic and author, wrote several books, including American Engravers and Their Works and The Origin and Antiquity of Engraving. An antiquarian who specialized in George Washington, he collected medals, biographies, and engraved portraits of the first president, and wrote about these subjects. Baker was an active member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, serving as a vice president from 1892 and also as a director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1882
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14536.16
- catalog number
- 14536.16
- 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 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
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