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 45 items.
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Ferris's Daughter May
- Description
- Stephen James Ferris etched an undated portrait of his daughter, May, in the costume of a bull fighter, and dedicated this impression to her. May Electa Ferris was born in 1871, eight years after her brother, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris. Like her father and brother, she was an artist. She learned to etch from her father and became known as an etcher and landscape painter, exhibiting in the 1880s and 1890s. Her paintings were reproduced as calendar artwork into the 1920s under her married name, May Ferris Smith.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c. 1890
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14405.01
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14405.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
An Etching Society Outing
- Description
- This light-hearted etching by Stephen Ferris, the Philadelphia Society of Etchers Outing in 1900, recalls the sixth such event held by the Society on the Neshaminy River near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Etching, eating, and games were the outing’s major activities.
- Ferris was a founding member of the Society, organized in 1880, and its first treasurer. Initially, it was an important source for information in the Philadelphia area about the newly revived technique of etching. The group met monthly during the summer for more than twenty years, offering occasions for its members to exchange prints.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1900
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14476
- accession number
- 94830
- catalog number
- 14476
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
- Description
- Stephen J. Ferris, a Philadelphia painter and etcher, specialized in portraiture. He etched this portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1881, noting in pencil at the lower right that this print was the earliest proof he took from the plate. Ferris etched many subjects for a variety of publications, including art periodicals and special editions of etchings. He made both original prints and reproductive etchings after works by other artists in other media.
- This image, like several other portrait prints of Lincoln, is based on the popular photograph made by the Mathew Brady studio in 1864. Ferris collected prints and photographs to aid him in his work, and his print collection came to the Smithsonian as a gift from the Ferris family.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1881
- depicted
- Lincoln, Abraham
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14531
- catalog number
- 14531
- 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
View in the Alhambra, Spain
- Description
- Stephen Ferris sketched and painted this pencil and watercolor view of buildings in the Alhambra complex of Granada, Spain, in 1881. This is not a finished view but a work in progress. The people rendered in pencil outline have not been colored, and there are many second thoughts like the tree at left, which has been enlarged. While in Granada, Ferris wrote a friend that he and his son were busy making sketches “much in memorandum for future use in pictures.” So captivated were they by the city that they spent more than half their Spanish visit there.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1881
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14545
- catalog number
- 14545
- accession number
- 94830
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Moorish Gate, Granada
- Description
- Stephen Ferris’s watercolor view Justicia, Granada shows the Alhambra’s Gate of Justice (Puerta de la Justicia) painted during the artist’s 1881 visit to Spain. In a letter to Sylvester R. Koehler, later Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian, Ferris, deeply moved by his experiences, observed: “‘See the Alhambra and die’ seems a very appropriate expression. I feel it and have more reverence for the Arabs [sic] art than any other school.”
- Today the Gate of Justice is the main entrance to the Alhambra complex, which was completed by the Moors in the fourteenth century. The Spanish, who defeated the Moors in 1492, made later additions.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1881
- graphic artist
- Ferris, Stephen James
- ID Number
- GA*14548
- catalog number
- 14548
- 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 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
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