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The American Declaration of Independence Illustrated.
Boston: Thayer & Co., 1861. Hand-colored tinted lithograph, 22.5” x 17”. CONDITION: Very good, recently backed with Japanese tissue, expert repairs of one 5.75” horizontal split in lower-left third and a few small marginal tears. A remarkable and seldom seen abolitionist lithograph published in Boston early in the Civil War. This “idealistic call for emancipation of the slaves” (Reilly) positions the abolitionist cause as a direct heir of the Declaration of Independence. It centers two men—one white, the other Black, his shackles falling away from him—borne aloft in a hot air balloon basket by an American Eagle, which also clutches olive and oak branches and two American flags bearing the mottos “All men are created equal” and “Stand by the Declaration.” The white man’s arm is raised oratorically, as though declaring to the enthusiastic, mixed-race crowd below what is printed just above the basket: “Break Every Yoke; Let the oppressed go free.” Above the eagle and to either side of the basket are abolitionist verses, the first stanza of which (over a blazing sun) reads: “My rays, where’er on earth they strike / Fall on the black and white alike ; / That government alone is free, / Which blesses all alike, like me.” The final stanza proclaims: “A man is a man howe’er dark his skin—, / A heart that is human is beating within—, / God regards not his color—and neither should we,— / Then ‘unchain’ the Negro—and let him go free.” The identity of the print’s designer is something of a mystery. We locate just one other item affiliated with the name R. Thayer and published in Boston: a pamphlet of verse by Michael Wigglesworth published by R. Thayer (no date, but dated 1862 by an early Wigglesworth biographer). Dominique Fabronius (1828–after 1890) was born in Belgium and in 1855 came to Philadelphia, where he worked as a lithographer, focusing on portraiture, at the firms of P. S. Duval and L. N. Rosenthal. In the 1860s he worked with firms in Boston and New York, as well as Cincinnati-based Middleton, Strobridge & Company, producing political cartoons and genre scenes, and between 1868 and 1870 was a partner in the chromolithography firm Fabronius, Gurney & Son. Louis Prang (1824–1909) was a major lithographer and publisher of prints, books, maps, greeting cards, paper toys and other ephemera in the late 19th century. Based in Boston, Prang enjoyed a career that spanned four decades. Many of his first lithographs were Civil War maps, battle and naval scenes, and portraits of political and military leaders. In 1864, he visited Europe where he studied the latest color lithographic processes, afterwards bringing a group of adept artists back to Boston with him, laying the groundwork for the extensive, high-quality printing operation the firm would become. Among the works of greatest significance Prang produced are Winslow Homer’s Campaign Sketches, a series of Civil War camp scenes that Homer himself drew on the lithographic stones for Prang, and a set of chromolithographs after watercolors by Thomas Moran that accompanied Ferdinand Hayden’s report on his pioneering exploration of the Yellowstone region in 1871. OCLC records just one holding, at the AAS. We locate additional examples at the Library of Congress and the Library Company of Philadelphia. REFERENCES: Reilly, American Political Prints 1861-41; Last, Jay. The Color Explosion : Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, California, 2005), pp. 122–123; Pierce, Sally and Catharina Slautterback. Boston Lithography, 1825–1880 (Boston, 1991), pp. 148–149, 155–156.
Item #8968
Price: $12,500.00