Sentimental genre prints documented the social image of Victorian virtue through domestic scenes of courtship, family, home life, and images of the “genteel female.” Children are depicted studying nature or caring for their obedient pets as they learn their place in the greater world. Romantic scenes picture devoted husbands with their contented, dutiful wives. In these prints, young women educated in reading, music, needlework, the arts, the language of flowers, basic math and science are subjugated to their family’s needs.
These prints became popular as lithography was introduced to 19th Century Americans. As a new art form, it was affordable for the masses and provided a means to share visual information by crossing the barriers of race, class and language. Sentimental prints encouraged the artistic endeavors of schoolgirls and promoted the ambitions of amateur artists, while serving as both moral instruction and home or business decoration. They are a pictorial record of our romanticized past.
This hand colored print is an interior scene with a young man seated on an ornately carved and fringed chair warming his feet by the fire and contemplating a lithograph entitled "Married." The background includes: boots under the chair, tongs for the fireplace, smoking pipe and tobacco tin or trade card on the hearth which read Anderson & Co. Honey Dew tobacco... New-York. Also depicted is a glass-enclosed pendulum clock on mantle, a framed picture on wall, a small table with brocade edged table cloth, two books and a small astral lamp. Heavy red drapes at the window and a patterned carpet complete the scene. Prints depicting a bachelor in his quarters and titled Single were common during this period and were often part of a series the included Married.
The print was produced by the lithography firm of Kelloggs & Thayer. Kelloggs and Thayer was the first partnership formed by Elijah Chapman and Edmund Burke Kellogg after they took over the family firm from their brother Daniel Wright Kellogg. Horace Thayer was a map dealer and in 1845 or 1846 the partnetship opened a shop in New York. The partnership appears to have dissolved in 1847. In 1848, he Kellogg brothers formed a new partnership with John Cheneyard Comstock.
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