Prints

A print after a painting

The Victoria and Albert Museum describes printmaking as transferring an image from one surface to another through a repeatable process. A block or plate can produce multiple impressions, but each impression is a physical object with its own paper, ink and condition.^[1]

When a museum calls a print “after” Church, it identifies the painter as the source of the design. The person who engraved or lithographed the image may be another maker. This division of work matters: translating painted colour, foliage and atmosphere into printed marks requires decisions about lines, tones and emphasis.

A reproductive print can therefore be studied both as a version of a painting and as a work in another medium. Recognising the source landscape is only the beginning. The print’s scale, surface and lettering can explain how it was made available to viewers and how its makers presented their roles.

Exhibition audiences and the reproduction business

Church’s Niagara became a public attraction in 1857. The National Gallery of Art explains that Williams, Stevens, & Williams bought the painting and its copyright for $4,500, then charged twenty-five cents to see it. Visitors to the exhibition, which opened on 1 May, received a pamphlet explaining how to order a chromolithograph.^[2]

The arrangement connected looking at the canvas with acquiring a reproduction. A visitor could encounter the large painting in a carefully presented exhibition and then obtain a more portable version. The two experiences were related, though a print could not reproduce the original canvas’s physical scale or painted surface.

This helps explain why the print’s history belongs beside the painting’s exhibition history. Reproduction was a commercial undertaking with several participants, rather than an incidental activity after a picture had become famous. The painter’s design, a publisher’s investment and a specialist printmaker’s labour contributed to the result.

Niagara in colour lithography

Lithography works through the different responses of greasy drawing materials and dampened blank areas to printing ink. Colour lithography builds an image through successive colours; Brigham Young University’s account of Victorian illustration explains that separate colours typically required separate printing plates.^[1][3]

The National Gallery of Art holds Charles Risdon’s The Great Fall, Niagara, after Church, with Day and Son named as publisher. It describes this particular impression as a hand-coloured chromolithograph on paperboard and dates it to 1874. The record also transcribes Church’s 1857 date and an 1857 copyright inscription. Those earlier inscriptions should not be used to turn the museum’s 1874 impression into a securely dated first issue.^[4]

In the print, green water rolls over the curving brink, while pale foam cuts across the nearer surface. A dark branch interrupts the foreground, giving the rushing water a small, irregular object around which to move. Toward the left, a rainbow descends into the mist beneath a warm sky.

These features preserve the painting’s broad attraction: the spectator seems close to water that cannot be controlled. Yet the printed surface has its own appearance. Fine marks describe the waves, and changes of tone separate the nearer water from the falling sheet beyond it. Looking at those relationships makes the reproduction more interesting than treating it as a smaller substitute for the canvas.

William Forrest and The Heart of the Andes

The reproduction of The Heart of the Andes required another kind of translation. In his study of the painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Kevin J. Avery explains that John McClure contracted William Forrest to engrave a steel plate. Forrest studied the original in Britain in 1859 and had it returned briefly in 1860. He also used photographs and a small watercolour copy as intermediaries; Avery attributes that copy to a professional British copyist, rather than securely to Church himself.^[5]

The National Gallery’s black engraving of 1862 names the participants in its inscription: Church as painter, Forrest as engraver, J. McClure as the New York publisher and Day & Son in London. It carries the publication date 1 May 1862 and belongs to the museum as accession 1992.34.1.^[6]

The landscape remains recognisable without its painted colours. The snowy mountain is pale against the sky, while closely worked trees fill the near right side. Waterfall and river create another bright passage through the darker foreground. The contrast between densely described growth and softer distance sustains the movement through the scene.

Forrest’s treatment makes tonal relationships especially conspicuous. A leaf or branch must be distinguished through printed marks, while a distant ridge can emerge through a much quieter transition. The viewer follows a familiar composition through a different system of description. Its monochrome appearance demonstrates how much of the landscape’s organisation can survive a change of medium.

Different impressions, different records

Museums describe individual examples of the Forrest reproduction in different ways. The Metropolitan Museum records its 1862 impression as a steel engraving, accession 1979.535.1. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts describes its example as engraving, etching and stipple on chine collé on cream wove paper, accession 1985.x.199.^[7][8]

Those descriptions should remain attached to their respective objects. A shared title and design do not justify transferring every material detail or sheet measurement from one museum’s example to another. The National Gallery’s black engraving, for instance, has its own image and sheet dimensions and its own collection credit.

Metal engraving also differs from wood engraving. As the V&A explains, a metal engraver cuts lines into a plate, where they hold ink for transfer to paper. In a wood engraving, the raised parts of the end-grain block carry the ink, while cut-away areas remain unprinted.^[1] Similar-looking networks of lines can consequently arise from quite different printing surfaces.

Our Banner in the Sky: print and paint together

The Terra Foundation’s Our Banner in the Sky complicates any simple division between painting and print. It consists of oil paint over a lithograph on paper laid on cardboard. The foundation explains that Church’s initial oil sketch followed the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and that a chromolithograph was commissioned that June. Its version is one of several lithographs presumably painted by Church himself; that attribution remains qualified.^[9]

In the image, red and pale clouds spread from a blue area containing stars. A bare tree rises at the left like a flagpole, while the darker land stays low beneath the sky. The suggestion of a flag depends on how these natural forms are arranged, rather than on a clearly bounded piece of cloth.

The layered medium gives this object a distinctive place among the reproductions. It begins with a printed design, but added paint makes it something more particular than an unaltered lithographic impression. The museum’s description establishes that combination; a digital photograph alone cannot reveal every boundary between the underlying print and the paint above it.

An adapted patriotic image

Our Heaven Born Banner develops the sky-as-flag idea into a different composition. Its catalogue information, reproduced in the Wikimedia Commons record from the Library of Congress, names William Bauly as painter, Sarony, Major & Knapp as lithographers and William Schaus as publisher. The colour lithograph dates to around 1861 and is described as evidently based on Church’s picture or its chromolithographic reproduction.^[10]

A sentry stands on the left-hand rocks, looking toward the luminous sky. His upright rifle replaces the tree’s role as the apparent flagstaff. Water, distant buildings and wooded shores provide a more extensive setting below the stars and coloured cloud bands.

The change makes human vigilance central to the scene. Church’s tree supplies a natural silhouette; the adapted print gives that position to an armed figure. Recognising the relationship between the images does not make them identical works or remove the other makers’ contributions. The altered foreground shows how a memorable device could be reused to carry a more explicit narrative.

A Tropical Moonlight on the printed page

A different encounter appears in G. W. Sheldon’s American Painters, published in New York in 1879. Its title page announces examples engraved on wood, and a plate captioned A Tropical Moonlight identifies the source as a painting by Church.^[11] This is a historical reproduction associated with the work discussed as Twilight in the Tropics.

Dark foliage frames the large moon above the water. The left-hand tree is densely worked, while palms at the right show individually described fronds. Broad foreground leaves rise into the opening, and lighter horizontal marks suggest the reflected light on the water.

The print offers a particularly clear example of hatching doing the work of colour and tone. Closely gathered marks make the near vegetation substantial; more open passages allow the moon and illuminated water to stand out. The arrangement can be studied through these relationships without mistaking the monochrome illustration for evidence of the original canvas’s colours.

BYU’s account explains why wood engraving suited nineteenth-century book illustration: wood blocks could be printed alongside movable type.^[3] That general capability does not identify the particular press used for Sheldon’s book, but it helps place its illustrated treatment of Church within a wider printing culture.

Looking at a reproduction today

Begin by identifying what the image represents. Is it a photograph of the oil painting, a scan of a particular historical engraving, or a photograph of an object combining print and paint? A title alone may leave these distinctions unresolved. Maker names, dates and medium descriptions provide more useful evidence.

Next, inspect the extent of the reproduction. A picture area, a sheet including lettering and a framed object offer different information. Cropping away an inscription can remove the names that explain a print’s making, while a coloured border can make the proportions difficult to judge.

Modern digital printing introduces another process; the V&A describes inkjet printing as transferring ink through nozzles onto a receiving surface.^[1] A newly printed reproduction of an 1862 engraving is still newly printed, even when the historic date remains visible within its image.

These distinctions sharpen the pleasure of looking. Church’s paintings can be followed through water, vegetation, atmosphere and architecture; their reproductions add another set of choices about lines, colours, surfaces and circulation. Attending to both reveals the landscape and the means by which it reached its viewers.