About This Catalogue>
Introduction

by
Georgia Brady Barnhill

The Catalogue of American Engravings (CAEP) is one of the online catalogues at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). The catalogue of engravings had been started many years before work began on it at AAS in 1979 with the anticipation that the result would be a printed reference work. As the project evolved and computers replaced note cards for data storage, the final product that we envisioned became a machine-readable database accessible through the Internet and easy to maintain and update. CAEP has been available through the Internet since 1992. Now numbering over 16,800 entries, CAEP has been available in its present web-based format since August 2003.

This catalogue could not have come to its present state of usefulness without the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1979, and other much appreciated support from the H. W. Wilson Foundation, the Getty Trust, and generous individuals.

Scope of the Catalogue

Scholars in many disciplines may now more easily locate American engravings that will enrich their research and publications. When images are read as text, they provide a different perspective, but an important one, as scholars seek to understand the past. Publishers of text books have been steady users of reproductions of American prints and illustrations, but even in the past twenty-five years, few have recognized the importance of relating the images reproduced to the historical discussion. Louis Masur, professor of history at the City College of New York, published a provocative essay in 1998 addressing this issue and calling for authors to "situate the images in their historical context." He writes, "From the start, images played a critical role in American history. . . Every image sheds light on the assumptions of the day. Every image reveals, as well as defines, events. Every image must be read, must be interpreted. This is a perilous act, one that often leads us far away from the safe ground sought by most historians." Before the availability of CAEP, it was difficult to locate images because of the lack of collection catalogues, descriptive lists, and the like. AAS anticipates that CAEP and other ongoing efforts of AAS will help remedy the situation described by Masur.

The comprehensiveness of the AAS collection is a major reason why this project was appropriate to AAS. Prints have been coming into the collections since the beginning of its history. Important early collections of visual material that became part of the great library once belonged to the Reverend William Bentley of Salem and Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, the founder of AAS. Clarence Brigham was responsible for bringing the almost complete oeuvre of Paul Revere to AAS. Marcus McCorison likewise acknowledged the importance of the collection by adding unique political cartoons by William Charles and James Akin, among other eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century items. Generous donors continue to add graphic arts items. The most recent significant American engraving added to the collection is the very rare portrait of the Reverend Increase Mather engraved by Thomas Emmes in 1701. This, the first portrait engraved on copper in colonial America, completes the visual documentation of the Mather family providing the important link between John Foster's woodcut of Richard Mather and Peter Pelham's painting and mezzotint of Cotton Mather, also at AAS.

Of the 16,832 cataloguing records for engravings in books, periodicals, almanacs, broadsides, and prints recorded in CAEP, few (16.5 percent) are not to be found in AAS collections. The strength of the holdings was only part of the reason why AAS was the logical place to base this project. As the collection grew, it also became institutionally important to bring it under bibliographical control and reduce reliance on of human memory. For over a half a century, limited access to signed engravings in books and pamphlets had been available through the AAS catalogue for early American imprints in which entries for the names of engravers and illustrators were regularly added. However, individual illustrations were not described, nor was there access for the vast body of unsigned engravings. Separately published engravings were housed in the graphic arts department, but without a descriptive catalogue. Before 1959, when Benjamin Lewis facilitated access to engravings in periodicals published through 1810 in his checklist, there was no easy way to search that important body of work.

The Catalogue of American Engravings and Its Use

Because of the special needs and interests of AAS, each record is searchable by date, place of publication, personal name (artist, engraver, subject, publisher, author of work); and genre (almanac illustrations, Bible engravings, illustrations for poetry, drama, fiction, encyclopedias, broadsides, etc.). Boolean searching capabilities allow for keyword combinations of these approaches.

One of the great disadvantages of the lists compiled by Stauffer and Fielding was the lack of subject access. Creating adequate subject access was one of the aims of the project. The machine environment enhances improved subject access because adding subject headings is so simple. Since standard Library of Congress headings do not work well, we created many of our own. We were fortunate in having access to a draft subject heading thesaurus created by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress which works well for describing images. The resulting list of subject terms is lengthy and rather idiosyncratic. Use the "Subject Browse" search available on the "Basic Search" page to view the catalogue by subject. Scanning the thesaurus suggests the range of illustrations published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A scholar can locate an allegorical figure of Justice or a newly designed piece of machinery, a trussed turkey or a view of the bridge over the Merrimack River. The range of images is stunning.

The catalogue is based on the collection of the American Antiquarian Society which has the foremost collection of the early American printed materials in the country. However, research was done at other libraries and museums across the country. The location of one impression of each item is recorded. Also in the records are the entry numbers that provide access to the Readex-Microprint Early American Imprint Series. This microform project, available in many university and research libraries, reproduces almost all American books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed through the year 1819. Although illustrations do not reproduce well on microfilm, often a researcher can determine from the microfilm whether a better reproduction is required from the library holding the original.

Reference to the Readex-Microprint Early American Imprints is just one of the features of the "new" Stauffer-Fielding. Of the 16,800 entries, only 1,000 describe separately published prints. The rest are illustrations in books and periodicals. Providing the publication context for this vast number of prints is critical. Many library and museum collections contain prints that have been removed from volumes. Referring to the Catalogue allows curators and scholars to determine when and where a given print was produced. Is a portrait print issued when the subject is alive or posthumously produced? The answer, to be found in the Catalogue, can reveal much about an individual's reputation and will lead the scholar to text elucidating the meaning and intention of the print and its producers. Some engravings are described as "detached leaves." We used this term to suggest that such prints appeared to be book illustrations, but were no longer bound in a volume. We continue to work to reduce the number of such engravings by trying to find impressions of them in their original context.

The Catalogue also provides information taken from accompanying text. For example, many images of American scenery were engraved after sketches and drawings that are no longer extant. Sometimes the original artist is not credited on the illustration, but is in the accompanying text. Again, pairing the text and the image reveals the authorship of the image and often provides additional information about the view and why the publisher or author expended the money to issue it.

Indeed, the Catalogue is searchable by the names of the publishers of the prints. This reinforces the active role of publishers in the production of prints, one that is often ignored. The works issued by publishers such as Mathew Carey, Samuel Wood, or Isaiah Thomas can now be easily identified. These publishers spent considerable amounts of money in engaging illustrators and engravers to embellish their publications. Historians of the book should find this information of interest.

Connoisseurship of American prints has lagged behind that of European prints. Attribution of unsigned prints is difficult and we did not attempt to attribute unsigned engravings in the Catalogue, unless there was strong contextual evidence for doing so. The Catalogue does, however, contribute in important ways to the connoisseurship of American prints. First, we attempted to record all known states of each print, relying on changes in the inscriptions as well as changes in the image itself. Stauffer and Fielding also recorded states, but many previously unidentified states have been recorded. Changes occurred when plates were transferred from one publisher to another or when plates were reprinted after the passage of time. Secondly, the Catalogue has more than tripled the number of known early American engravings. Only substantial funding can facilitate the recording of so many items. For example, neither Stauffer, Fielding, nor Colt had recorded the engravings in American encyclopedias. As it developed, CAEP came to include 2,325 prints describing the current state of technology--the engines, machines, measuring devices, and apparatus of industrializing America. Through these encyclopedia engravings, British and continental technology could be viewed by self-taught American artisans who recreated some of the machinery depicted. The careful examination of so many prints by trained eyes revealed the presence of initials within the designs and below inscriptions indicating the hand of an apprentice even though the engraving was signed by a master engraver. Judy Larson identified early works by Francis Shallus, Benjamin Jones, and John Draper in Thomas Dobson's Encyclopaedia published in Philadelphia in 1798 in this way. The existence of such circles of engravers working collaboratively is a discovery made possible by the Catalogue.

Definitive catalogues of the works of individual American engravers are few in number. Clarence Brigham's monograph on Paul Revere is exemplary, as are Andrew Oliver's and Wendy Shadwell's catalogues of the prints of Peter Pelham and Charles Willson Peale, respectively. The availability of the Catalogue will facilitate the creation of other definitive lists. The complete work of engravers who produced maps and ephemera, such as trade cards, billheads, currency, and bookplates, cannot be determined from the Catalogue, but it is a good place to begin.

Another question that can be answered using the database relates to the training of engravers. Using the ability to search the Catalogue by date and place of publication, it is possible to learn the names of engravers working at a specific time and place. These are the professional engravers available to train the next generation. Stylistic comparisons can then be made to identify master engravers and their apprentices.

The name of the illustrator or artist primarily responsible for creating the image in the engraving is the main entry. If provided, the name of the engraver is indexed and can also be searched. In cases where the engraver was also the creator of the original image, he is indexed twice, once as engraver and once as illustrator. Thus it is possible to differentiate Elkanah Tisdale's work as an illustrator and engraver.

A substantial proportion, perhaps as high as half, of early American engravings, was issued anonymously, without any attribution to artist or engraver. In cases of inflammatory political prints, anonymity is understood. However, the lack of names can be frustrating. It was decided at the outset of the revision that unsigned engravings would be included. Anonymous engravings would be difficult to arrange and index in a published reference work; in the database, all of the engravings in a given book can be assembled by entering the title of the work in which they were published.

The inclusion of anonymous engravings enriches the database enormously. Many of them are technical illustrations or diagrams; others are illustrations in children's books, showing children engaged in all kinds of activities. This imagery can be used demonstrate relationships between children and adults, children and pets, activities that amused children, punishments inflicted on misbehaving children, and so on. The subjects are almost endless. At the same time, it can be critical to separate fact from fiction and returning to the text.

When the decision was made to create a machine-readable database, we added genre headings to the records. Using this part of the record facilitates the study of engravings specifically issued to illustrate fiction, poetry, essays, children's books, drama, almanacs, bibles, encyclopedias, periodicals, broadsides, among the others on the appended list. In addition, we differentiated among the many kinds of certificates and forms that were engraved. Searching the genre term "Keys to Paintings" retrieves three items describing Benjamin West's Christ Healing the Sick and the Death of General Montgomery at Quebec and John Trumbull's Bunker Hill. Over 250 engravings for drawing and painting manuals are recorded. The researcher can also create lists, albeit extremely long ones, to differentiate between engravings used as frontispieces and those that are plates within books.

Publication of the Catalogue as a multivolume reference work has been given careful consideration over the past several years. The decision was recently reached to maintain it solely as an online catalogue and there are excellent reasons to do so. One is purely financial. Preparing the data for publication, indexing, and printing it would involve a substantial financial commitment for a limited audience. Also, printing the index to the entries would involve a great deal of compromise. Each entry has several subject headings in addition to one or more genre headings. Printing the subject and genre index in its entirety would be a mammoth undertaking. It is doubtful that an index by place of printing or publisher would be undertaken. Furthermore, publishing the Catalogue in print freezes it at a moment in its evolution and commits AAS to a long succession of published additions and corrections. In its long history as a publisher of bibliographies, AAS has learned that no bibliography is ever complete. The "not in" items typically begin to emerge before the printer's ink is dry. AAS and libraries around the country continue to add to their holdings of early American imprints; newly discovered engravings can be added easily to CAEP. Indeed, we hope that libraries and collectors will assist AAS in improving CAEP by reporting their new acquisitions or corrections to the data as presented.

GEORGIA BRADY BARNHILL is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society.