Duval & Bowen: Pioneers of American Printmaking

This week I aim to shine a light on the stories of those players “behind the scenes” of history- the artists and engravers, historians, print and publishing houses, and illustrators who created the wealth of 19th and 20th century printed material we have, and sell, now. 

Too often, our focus as dealers is on the individual prints or maps and the stories they present, either through the subject matter of the image, the new territories now present on the map, or the influence the images have on the public. Not nearly enough attention is given to the engravers working on the plates and the commercial printing houses who trained artists and pushed printing technology forward, all while competing with each other to sell the best image, at the best cost, to the most number of people. 

Two elaborate broadside presentations of the Emancipation in our collection granted me the opportunity to learn more about Peter Duval. Duval immigrated to Philadelphia in 1831 to work for Cephas G. Childs, one of the first commercial Philadelphia printing firms. In less than seven years, Duval had opened his own lithography business. His workshop served as a training ground for a generation of printmakers, whose artistic abilities, he believed, should match those of fine artists. Duval’s company was one of the earliest printing firms to utilize steam power in lithographic printing and explore new ways to automate the lithographic printing process. He also experimented with lithotints, in which larger areas of color were created by washes applied to separate stones. Thanks to his innovations, background areas, like skies in landscape views, could be printed in color, giving colorists more time to focus on minute detail work.

Working at the same time and in the same city, lithographer and publisher John T. Bowen is renowned for his work on McKenny and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America, the printed plates for Audubon's Quadrupeds (1845-1848), and octavo edition of Birds of America (1839-1844). We just added four portraits from the McKenney and Hall series to our collection, as well as a stunning Rocky Mountain Sheep by Audubon. 

Born in London, Bowen immigrated to the United States in 1834, where he worked as a colorist and lithographer in New York. Four years later, he moved to Philadelphia to work on McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes, where he soon established himself as the preeminent lithographer and hand-colorist of Philadelphia. Many might be surprised to learn that Bowen employed twenty females as colorists for his series; the women often worked at home so their neighbors would not perceive that they were employed. Bowen eventually married one of his colorists and his wife Lavinia carried on his lithography business after his death in 1856.

As you explore this week's new arrivals, I hope you will look beyond the finished image to appreciate the remarkable craftsmen who made these works possible. Their names may not be as familiar as the statesmen, explorers, or scenes they depicted, but their contributions shaped how generations of Americans encountered art and their own history.