Posterboard with pre-printed design and painted advertisement for the mutoscope motion picture "The Stage at Coyote Holes" - starring Wally Wales. An attached photograph depicts a scene from the movie in which a man threatens a Native American with a revolver in an "Old West" town. The Western film genre is almost as old as the motion picture itself; Edwin S. Porter's 1902 film "The Great Train Robbery" is often considered the first narrative motion picture, and it also gave birth to the Western genre. The motion picture advertised on this poster stars Wally Wales (born Hal Taliaferro), an actor who appeared in over 200 films and usually played a cowboy or prospector in low-budget "B" Westerns. By the 1920s, when this poster was made, Western films were highly popular among American audiences and stars like Wally Wales could attract audiences who were familiar with their past performances.
Description
The Mutoscope Collection in the National Museum of American History’s Photographic History Collection is among the most significant of its kind in any museum. Composed of 3 cameras, 13 viewers, 59 movie reels and 53 movie posters, the collection documents the early years of the most successful and influential motion picture company of the industry’s formative period. It also showcases a unique style of movie exhibition that outlasted its early competitors, existing well into the 20th century.
The American Mutoscope Company was founded in 1895 by a group of four men, Elias Koopman, Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to manufacture a motion picture viewer called the mutoscope and to produce films for exhibition. Dickson had recently left the employ of Thomas Edison, for whom he had solved the problem of “doing for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” by inventing the modern motion picture. Casler and Dickson worked together to perfect the mutoscope, which exhibited films transferred to a series of cards mounted in the style of a flip book on a metal core, and avoided Edison’s patents with this slightly different style of exhibition. The company’s headquarters in New York City featured a rooftop studio on a turntable to ensure favorable illumination, and the short subjects made here found such success that by 1897, the Edison company’s dominance of the industry was in danger. American Mutoscope became American Mutoscope & Biograph in 1899, when the namesake projector, invented by Casler, became the most used in the industry.
Mutoscope viewers were found in many amusement areas and arcades until at least the 1960s. Their inexpensiveness and short, often comical or sensational subjects allowed the machines a far longer life than the competing Edison Kinetoscope. The company also found success in its production and projection of motion pictures, though its activity was mired by patent litigation involving Thomas Edison through the 1910s. The notable director D. W. Griffith was first hired as an actor, working with pioneering cinematographer G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, before moving behind the camera at Biograph and making 450 films for the company.
Griffith and Bitzer invented cinematographic techniques like the fade-out and iris shot, made the first film in Hollywood and launched the careers of early stars Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. The company, simply renamed the Biograph Company in 1909, went out of business in 1928 after losing Griffith and facing a changing movie industry.
The Museum’s collection was acquired in the years between 1926 and the mid-1970s. The original mutograph camera and two later models of the camera were given to the Smithsonian in 1926 by the International Mutoscope Reel Company, which inherited Biograph’s mutoscope works and continued making the viewers and reels through the 1940s. The viewers, reels and posters in the collection were acquired for exhibition in the National Museum of American History, and were later accessioned as objects in the Photographic History Collection. Many of the mutoscope reels in the collection date to the period from 1896-1905, and show early motion picture subjects, some of which were thought to be lost films before their examination in 2008.
Albert Bierstadt's (1830–1902) large painting, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, completed in 1863, presented the drama of the American West to audiences in the Eastern United States. Although it was more than a decade after the Gold Rush drew settlers to California, most people still had not seen many images of the West. Bierstadt specialized in these landscapes, and he produced impressive paintings of Yosemite and other Western scenes.
The Rocky Mountains was Bierstadt's first big success, and he quickly developed a marketing strategy to promote his work. He contracted with engraver James Smillie (1807–1885) to produce a large black-and-white reproductive print. Then he sent the painting on tour, to be exhibited in art galleries in several eastern cities, accompanied by a subscription book and promotional flyers describing the engraving. It was available in four versions, from a limited number of artists' proofs priced at $50 each to an unlimited edition of plain proofs at $10 each. The painting was shown in 1864 at Civil War Sanitary Commission fairs in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, before being sold to an English businessman. Since 1907 it has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Public exhibitions in commercial galleries, together with the growth of the print trade, expanded opportunities for people to see paintings and purchase reproductions. Throughout his career, Bierstadt issued prints after his paintings, using many different graphic processes. Publishing prints enhanced an artist's reputation and added significantly to his income, but engraving on steel was a slow and painstaking process. It took Smillie more than three years to complete his work.
In 1888 the Museum received this final state of the print directly from Bierstadt, and Smillie's son George donated an early etched proof. Both states were exhibited together to demonstrate the process of engraving.
This engraved printing plate was prepared to print an image of "Ethnographical Map of Oregon Showing the Limits of the Tribes and their Affinities by Language. By H. Hale. U.S. Ex. Ex. 1841" for the publication "United States Exploring Expedition, During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842," Volume 6, preceding page 197, in the edition Philadelphia : C. Sherman, 1846. The engraving was produced by the firm Sherman and Smith.
In 1898 New York photographer Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) embarked on a deeply personal project, creating a set of prints that rank among the most compelling of her celebrated body of work. Käsebier was on the threshold of a career that would establish her as both the leading portraitist of her time and an extraordinary art photographer. Her new undertaking was inspired by viewing the grand parade of Buffalo Bill's Wild West troupe en route to Madison Square Garden for several weeks of performances.
Käsebier had spent her childhood on the Great Plains, and retained many vivid, happy memories of playing with nearby Native American children. She quickly sent a letter to William "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917), requesting permission to photograph Sioux Indians traveling with the show in her studio. Within weeks, Käsebier began a unique and special project photographing the Indian men, women, and children, formally and informally. Friendships developed, and her photography of these Native Americans continued for more than a decade.
Young Whirling Hawk sat for his photograph against the darkest of the backdrops used by Käsebier. Studio lighting highlights his profile and details on the bone breast-plate, intricate embroidery of the vest, feathers, headdress, and armbands.
Albert Bierstadt's (1830–1902) large painting, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, completed in 1863, presented the drama of the American West to audiences in the Eastern United States. The Rocky Mountains was Bierstadt's first big success, and he quickly developed a marketing strategy to promote his work. He contracted with engraver James Smillie (1807–1885) to produce a large black-and-white reproductive print. Then he sent the painting on tour, to be exhibited in art galleries in several eastern cities, accompanied by a subscription book and promotional flyers describing the engraving. It was available in four versions, from a limited number of artists' proofs priced at $50 each to an unlimited edition of plain proofs at $10 each.
Public exhibitions in commercial galleries, together with the growth of the print trade, expanded opportunities for people to see paintings and purchase reproductions. Publishing prints enhanced an artist's reputation and added significantly to his income, but engraving on steel was a slow and painstaking process. It took Smillie more than three years to complete his work, in part because the painting was unavailable for him to copy. First Smillie drew the details of the image with a needle on a large steel plate, measuring 43 by 70.5 centimeters. This background image was etched in acid, and the Museum's copy is an early stage proof made "off the acid" to check Smillie's progress with the design. Several areas of the print remain to be completed. They were finished by hand with the engraver's cutting tool called the burin.
In 1888 Smillie's son George donated this proof, which had been signed and dated by his father in 1865. Bierstadt also donated a signed impression of the final state of the print. Both states were exhibited together to demonstrate the process of engraving.
The French-born artist Jean Charlot spent his early career during the 1920s in Mexico City. His 1948 lithograph depicts a scene from the domestic life of a Mexican indigenous woman, a favorite theme of the artist. Household work—without the aid of most, if any, electrical appliances—was a full-time job for many working-class and poor Mexican women, north and south of the border, well into the 20th century. Food preparation was especially labor-intensive. Corn had to be processed, wood gathered, and water fetched, in the midst of child rearing and other household duties. This was the daily fare of most women, who rarely worked outside the home after marriage. Mexican American women who found work in cities like El Paso in the early 20th century were either single or widowed. Many worked as domestic servants, others in industrial laundries or textile mills. Like today, some women turned to their kitchens to earn a living, making meager profits selling prepared food on the street to Mexican American workers and Mexican migrants.
Description (Spanish)
El artista francés Jean Charlot pasó los años 1920, a comienzos de su carrera, en la ciudad de México. Esta litografía suya de 1948 representa una escena de la vida doméstica de una mujer indígena, un tema favorito del artista. Las tareas domésticas—sin la ayuda de la mayor parte de los aparatos electrodomésticos—constituían un trabajo de todo el día para muchas mujeres pobres de la clase trabajadora de México, al norte y sur de la frontera, hasta bien entrado el siglo XX. La preparación de la comida era especialmente trabajosa. Debía procesarse el maíz, juntarse leña y acarrear el agua, sumados a la crianza de los hijos y otras obligaciones domésticas. Así era la vida diaria para la mayoría de las mujeres, quienes raramente trabajaban fuera del hogar una vez casadas. A principios del siglo XX, las mujeres mexicoamericanas que trabajaban, en ciudades como El Paso, eran solteras o viudas. Muchas se empleaban en el servicio doméstico, otras en lavanderías industriales o fábricas textiles. Al igual que en la actualidad, algunas mujeres convertían su cocina en un medio para ganarse la vida, obteniendo exiguas ganancias a través de la venta de comidas preparadas en la calle para trabajadores mexicoamericanos e inmigrantes mexicanos.
William Blaeu's decorative map, made about 1648, includes oval vignettes of Latin American cities and harbors along the top border. Paired examples of different native peoples line either side, including the King and Queen of Florida shown in the detail. The map represents contemporary geographical understanding of the New World, together with sea monsters and other imaginative features.
Many maps of the Americas were produced during the period of exploration and colonial settlement in the 17th century. The period between 1630 and 1700 is known as the golden age of Dutch cartography, as the Netherlands was a center for map publishing as well as for the country's maritime enterprise that depended on maps and charts.
The Museum's map collection includes a number of important examples received as a gift from Mabel Brady Garvan, who, with her husband Francis P. Garvan, built an important collection of American paintings, furniture, and decorative arts that is now at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Laredo, also published as Laredo Crockett by Bob Schoenke was distributed by The Register and Tribune Syndicate from 1950 to 1965. The comic strip had a Western theme, featuring American Indians, cowboys, and the title character, Laredo Crockett. In this strip, Ben is taken into police custody because it appears that he shot Cholla in the back.
This map of North and South America appeared as part of a seven-volume historic atlas published in Paris between 1705 and 1720. It was also issued separately, and its large size together with its companion lower half suggest its use as a wall chart. Only a detail is shown here. Circular portraits identify nine great explorers, including Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci. Five voyages of discovery are marked on the Pacific Ocean, the southern ocean of the title.
Elaborate engraved vignettes depict beavers building a dam, Native Americans hunting and fishing, and other men salting and drying codfish. Niagara Falls is pictured, and California is shown as an island, although the growing belief that it was part of the continent is noted.
Little Joe, created and drawn by Ed Leffingwell (d. 1936) and later, his brother Robert until 1972, was distributed by The News Syndicate Company and the Chicago Tribune Syndicate from 1933 to 1972. Leffingwell began his career as an assistant artist on Little Orphan Annie, so the character Little Joe and the early storyline often resembles that of Annie. The strip features a teenage boy, Joe, and his family and workers on a ranch in the western U.S. In this strip, Joe and Dead-Pan cross a ravine by using a fallen log.
Frederick de Wit's decorative map, made about 1650, includes oval vignettes of Latin American cities along the top border. Single figures of different native peoples line either side, including a Virginiani chief and brave, as shown in the detail. Some figures have been crudely colored to cover their nakedness. The map represents a flawed understanding of New World geography, such as picturing California as an island.
Many maps of the Americas were produced during the period of exploration and colonial settlement in the 17th century. The period between 1630 and 1700 is known as the golden age of Dutch cartography, as the Netherlands was a center for map publishing as well as for the country's maritime enterprise that depended on maps and charts.
The Museum's map collection includes a number of important examples received as a gift from Mabel Brady Garvan, who, with her husband Francis P. Garvan, built an important collection of American paintings, furniture, and decorative arts that is now at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Mr. Dayton is known to history solely by the currency he had printed for his bank, and it is not known whether the bank ever opened its doors. But it was his bank, and he had the right, so his grim visage, complete with imposing widow's peak, graces each of the three known denominations: one-, two-, and five-dollar bills.
The Dayton Bank was one of thousands of private issuers, supplying the capital that created the economic miracle of 19th-century America. No government dared issue paper money in those days: Americans had been so badly burned by inflation during one crisis (the Revolutionary War), that they would not countenance another public issue until another crisis (the Civil War).
The imagery on this note is very typical of that found in this period, especially on issues from western banks. Racial and ethnic stereotypes were prevalent and emphasized the dominance of white culture.
With her camera, Lisa Law documented history in the heart of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s as she lived it, as a participant, an agent of change and a member of the broader culture. She recorded this unconventional time of Anti-War demonstrations in California, communes, Love-Ins, peace marches and concerts, as well as her family life as she became a wife and mother. The photographs were collected by William Yeingst and Shannon Perich in a cross-unit collecting collaboration. Together they selected over two hundred photographs relevant to photographic history, cultural history, domestic life and social history.
Law’s portraiture and concert photographs include Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Lovin Spoonful and Peter, Paul and Mary. She also took several of Janis Joplin and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, including the photograph used to create the poster included in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s exhibition 1001 Days and Nights in American Art. Law and other members of the Hog Farm were involved in the logistics of setting up the well-known musical extravaganza, Woodstock. Her photographs include the teepee poles going into the hold of the plane, a few concert scenes and amenities like the kitchen and medical tent. Other photographs include peace rallies and concerts in Haight-Ashbury, Coretta Scott King speaking at an Anti-War protest and portraits of Allen Ginsburg and Timothy Leary. From her life in New Mexico the photographs include yoga sessions with Yogi Bhajan, bus races, parades and other public events. From life on the New Buffalo Commune, there are many pictures of her family and friends taken during meal preparation and eating, farming, building, playing, giving birth and caring for children.
Ms. Law did not realize how important her photographs were while she was taking them. It was not until after she divorced her husband, left the farm for Santa Fe and began a career as a photographer that she realized the depth of history she recorded. Today, she spends her time writing books, showing her photographs in museums all over the United States and making documentaries. In 1990, her video documentary, “Flashing on the Sixties,” won several awards.
A selection of photographs was featured in the exhibition A Visual Journey: Photographs by Lisa Law, 1964–1971, at the National Museum of American History October 1998-April 1999.
This Dutch map, made about 1655, shows eastern North America from what is now Canada to Virginia. Illustrations within the map include bears, beaver, deer, foxes, turkeys, and rabbits, as well as Indian villages on land, and Indians in boats at sea. The lower right corner of the map contains an inset of Nieuw Amsterdam, the third known engraved view of that city which is now New York. The view is framed by a decorative cartouche with fruits and a crest and flanked by Indian figures on either side. This is the second version or state of this map, and number 5 of a series identified by historians as the Jansson-Visscher maps. Fort Kasimier has been added on the Delaware River to recognize the Dutch capture of the fort in 1655.
Many maps of the Americas were produced during the period of exploration and colonial settlement in the 17th century. The period between 1630 and 1700 is known as the golden age of Dutch cartography, as the Netherlands was a center for map publishing as well as for the country's maritime enterprise that depended on maps and charts.
The Museum's map collection includes a number of important examples received as a gift from Mabel Brady Garvan, who, with her husband Francis P. Garvan, built an important collection of American paintings, furniture, and decorative arts that is now at the Yale University Art Gallery.
La Malinche, the title of this lithograph, was the indigenous woman who translated for Cortés between Maya, Náhuatl, and Spanish during his first years in Mexico. Considered either as a traitor or a founding mother by some Mexicans, La Malinche was Cortés's lover and the mother of his favorite son Martín. She and Moctezuma are also central figures in the Matachines dances that are performed in Mexico and New Mexico. Originally commemorating the expulsion of the Moors from southern Spain in 1492, the dance was brought to Mexico where it was treated as a means for Christianizing native peoples. The historical figure of La Malinche, known in Spanish by the name Doña Marina, is also credited for playing an almost miraculous role in the early evangelization of central Mexico. This print, made by Jean Charlot in the 1933, shows a young girl in the role of La Malinche, holding a rattle or toy in one hand, and a sword in the other. Jean Charlot, a French-born artist, lived and studied in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. He depicted stylized scenes from the daily life of Mexican workers, particularly indigenous women.
Description (Spanish)
La Malinche, título de esta litografía, fue la mujer indígena que interpretaba para Cortés entre los mayas, náhuatl y españoles durante sus primeros años en México. La Malinche, quien para algunos mexicanos es una traidora, mientras que otros la consideran la madre fundadora, fue la amante de Cortés y la madre de su hijo favorito, Martín. Ella y Moctezuma constituyen también los personajes centrales de las danzas matachines que se interpretan en México y Nuevo México. Al principio estas danzas conmemoraban la expulsión de los moros del sur de España, pero en 1492 cuando la danza llegó a México se la utilizó como medio para cristianizar a los pueblos nativos. Se le atribuye también a la figura histórica de La Malinche, conocida asimismo como Doña Marina, un desempeño casi milagroso dentro de la temprana evangelización de México. Esta ilustración, hecha por Jean Charlot en 1933, es la imagen de una niña representando a La Malinche, sosteniendo un sonajero o juguete en una mano y una espada en la otra. Jean Charlot fue un artista francés que vivió y estudió en México entre las décadas de 1920 y 1930, quien se dedicó a ilustrar escenas estilizadas de la vida diaria de los trabajadores mexicanos y en particular de las mujeres indígenas.
Though anchored in local Roman Catholic traditions, many of the religious beliefs and symbols of Mexican Americans have roots in indigenous notions about the soul and our universe. Between October 31st and November 2nd, Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated with family, decorating home altars and visiting the graves of loved ones. A holiday with much regional and individual variation, it is traditionally an occasion to commemorate parents and grandparents with altars of marigolds, candles, alcohol, skeleton-shaped sweets, and other foods and personal objects favored by the dearly departed. Day of the Dead celebrations were reinvented across many Mexican American communities beginning in the 1970s, as the Chicano movement promoted and readapted Mexican cultural practices. Many artists since then have seized on the visual power of the altar as a conduit for personal and public memory. In the United States, Day of the Dead altars can be found interrogating life and critiquing politics in public places. Contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations have memorialized those who have died from AIDS, gang violence, the civil wars in Central America, and crossing the border. This lithograph, titled Night of the Dead, was originally drawn in ink by Alan Crane in 1958. Alan Horton Crane (1901–1969) was a Brooklyn-born illustrator best known for his landscapes and genre scenes of life in Mexico and New England. This image is part of a series of prints by Alan Crane housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
Description (Spanish)
Se puede decir que muchas de las creencias religiosas y símbolos de los mexicoamericanos, si bien se afirman en las tradiciones de la iglesia católica romana, tienen sus raíces en nociones indígenas sobre el alma y el universo. Entre el 31 de octubre y el 2 de noviembre, se celebra el Día de los Muertos en familia, decorando el hogar y visitando las tumbas de los seres queridos difuntos. Se trata de una festividad con variaciones regionales e individuales, en ocasión de conmemorar a los padres y abuelos ausentes con altares de caléndulas, velas, alcohol, dulces con formas de esqueletos y otras comidas y objetos personales de preferencia de los seres queridos ya difuntos. Las celebraciones del Día de los Muertos se reinventaron en todas las comunidades mexicoamericanas a comienzos de la década de 1970, cuando el movimiento chicano propició y readaptó las prácticas culturales mexicanas. Desde entonces muchos artistas se han servido del poder visual del altar como conducto de la memoria personal y pública. En Estados Unidos, pueden hallarse altares del Día de los Muertos erigidos en lugares públicos para expresar interrogantes de la vida o críticas a políticos. Las celebraciones contemporáneas del Día de los Muertos han conmemorado a los muertos por SIDA, por la violencia de las pandillas, por las guerras en Centroamérica y por los cruces de frontera. Esta litografía, titulada Noche de los Muertos, fue originalmente dibujada en tinta por Alan Crane en 1958. Alan Horton Crane (1901-1969) fue un ilustrador nacido en Brooklyn, más conocido por sus paisajes y pinturas de género sobre la vida en México y Nueva Inglaterra. Esta imagen forma parte de la serie de grabados de Alan Crane albergados en la Colección de Artes Gráficas del Museo Nacional de Historia Americano.