Curated by Kobe Jackson and Ali Beaudette
This selection of items from Fleet Library’s Special Collections showcases an array of work representing the history of chromolithography, one of the earliest forms of color printing. Bavarian author Aloys Senefelder, who, in 1796, invented lithography in Germany, introduced the subject of colored lithography in 1818. The process arrived in the U.S. in 1819. As an alternative to relief or intaglio printing, lithography printing creates an image using chemical processes on a stone tablet, usually porous limestone or zinc. The contrast of hydrophobic chemicals with water enables ink to adhere to the positive image and water to clean the negative image.
A chromo could take months to produce, depending on the number of colors present. Using anywhere from eight to forty stones, one for each color, a lithographer gradually built and corrected the print to look as much like the finished portrait painting or photograph in front of them. Each sheet of paper passes through the printing press the number of times of the different colors in the final print.
Chromolithographs, also known as “chromos,” during the Victorian era, populated children’s and fine arts publications, trade cards, labels, posters, advertisements, popular prints and reproductive prints of paintings. Chromolithographs were printed widely to meet consumer demand as mass-produced products.
In addition to work created between 1867-1944, pieces on view in this exhibit include contemporary Artists' Books that utilize historical chromolithography imagery as well as examples of recent RISD student lithography.
- The art of chromolithography: popularly explained and illustrated by forty-four plates showing separate impressions of all the stones employed, George Ashdown Audsley, 1883
- The preacher, chromolithography and illumination by Owen Jones, 1849
- Te Deum laudamus. (Book of Common Prayer), chromolithographed by M. & N. Hanhart, 1890
- Insectes, compiled by Sol P. Kaufman
- Abstract pattern, Mizuki Heitaro, 1930
- The technique of colour printing by lithography: a concise manual of drawn lithography, Thomas E. Griffits, 1944
- San Francisco Lithographer, African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown, 2014
- Billy Rose's Aquacade, 1940
- San Diego Panama-California Exposition souvenir book, 1915
- Album of the Paris Exhibition, 1889
- My elusive Cockney family, Angela Lorenz, 2012
- More dicky birds, or, Cockney rhyming words, Angela Lorenz, 2012
- The Berlitz method: illustrations for the first book, M. D. Berlitz, 1878
- The New pretty village: church set, 1897
- Pictures from Mother Goose, Feodor Rojankovsky, 1945
- World-wide fables, J. M. Kronheim, 1867
- Ring-a-round-a-rosy: pictures and verses by Mary A. Lathbury, 1885
- Noor: light and glory: scratching at the surface of cultural identity, Saman Sajasi, 2013
- Field notes on the re-imagined theory of the motion in the fold in the malleable body: a thesis, Amanda Thackray, 2012