Current Exhibitions

June 28, 2008 - October 5, 2008

A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views brings Pittsburgh's early days and industrial development to life in a celebration of the city's 250th anniversary.

Organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center and featuring more than 130 printed views of the city, the exhibition opens June 28, 2008, and will remain on view through October 5, 2008.

A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views illustrates the breadth of the visual representation of Pittsburgh in books, magazines, newspapers, maps, corporate identity, lithographs, and other types of materials during the 1800s, including documentary prints of the riveting events that put Pittsburgh in the headlines-like labor disputes, fires, and other disasters, which were published in the popular periodicals and newspapers of the day.

Advertising imagery, sheet music, job order prints, and prints of significant architecture, are also included in the exhibition, which is the first systematic study and exploration of early printed views of Pittsburgh.

Prints have been selected from local public and private collections, such as the Carnegie museums and library, Hillman Company, Chatham University, University of Pittsburgh, the Duquesne Club, and Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, as well as from institutions around the country.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provide an in-depth exploration of historic depictions of Pittsburgh, as well as the development of printmaking in the city-from the first known rendering of the city made in 1790 by German-born linguist, surveyor and businessman Lewis Brantz, to prints of current events as published in popular periodicals, such as Harper's Weekly, later in the nineteenth century.

Frick director Bill Bodine comments, "The Frick is delighted to present this very special exhibition to the City of Pittsburgh on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. The catalogue that accompanies A Panorama of Pittsburgh will serve as a lasting and invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in the growth and development of Pittsburgh during its rise to prominence, and will ensure that this important project lives on well beyond this special celebration."

The exhibition and catalogue are planned in sections: Pittsburgh Before the Fire, Views from Books and Magazines, Documentary Views, Illustrated Newspapers, Frameable Views, Pittsburgh Lithographers, and Other Types of Prints.

Early drawings of Pittsburgh depicted the settlement that grew up around Fort Pitt. Lewis Brantz's Pittsburgh in 1790 portrays a small group of buildings clustered on the flat bit of land where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio. Brantz was traveling to the western parts of the United States to survey the commercial possibilities of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Passing by Pittsburgh, Brantz noted, "The view enjoyed at this place, from two elevated spots is, in truth, the most beautiful I ever beheld." Remarkably, Brantz's watercolor has survived, providing us with the first glimpse of the town. His original ink drawing is part of the exhibition, as is the print made years later, during the nineteenth century.

As the city grew and local business developed, so did Pittsburgh's own printmaking industry, and artistic community. William Coventry Wall was one of the first to make his living in western Pennsylvania as an artist. Wall emigrated with his family from England to Pennsylvania early in the nineteenth century.

After a brief stay in Kentucky, he moved to Pittsburgh in 1841 and ran a picture frame and artist's supply shop. It was after the Great Fire of 1845 in Pittsburgh that Wall received his first financial success as an artist. He had painted two scenes of the city after the fire and decided to have lithographs made of both. They sold well and led to more attention and work for Wall.

In 1877, he gained access to a sketch of Pittsburgh made by Mrs. E. C. Gibson while on her honeymoon trip and he thought it of sufficient interest to turn into a painting, which he proceeded to exhibit in the front window of Boyd's Gallery on Wood Street. That same year, Charles O. Lappe commissioned the Pittsburgh Lithographing Company to produce a chromolithograph after Wall's painting, the colorful View of the City of Pittsburgh in 1817.

Visitors to the exhibition will also see nineteenth-century Pittsburgh as portrayed by itinerant artists, many of whom specialized in traveling from city to city creating printed views for a subscription base. The 1849 print View of Pittsburgh, Pa. by Edwin Whitefield is one such print. Known in only a single extant example, this first large-scale frameable view of Pittsburgh, was created based on subscriptions sold for $5 each by Whitefield's agent in the spring of 1848. Progress of the preparatory drawings and the production of the print was followed in the local press, and the final product, printed by the New York firm of Hudson & Smith, was completed by the autumn of 1849.

Historic events shaped the commerce, prosperity and arts of the region. The War of 1812 cut off the supply of British goods, stimulating American manufacture, and by 1815, Pittsburgh was producing significant quantities of iron, brass, tin, and glass products. By the 1840s, Pittsburgh had grown into one of the largest cities west of the Allegheny Mountains, although this expansion was stalled by the fire of 1845. Recovering rapidly, the city had nearly 1,000 factories by 1857. The American Civil War boosted the city's economy still further, with increased demand for iron and armaments, and production of steel began in 1875.

The majority of prints produced in the nineteenth century were published as illustrations in publications such as magazines, books and atlases-a role that prints had played for centuries. Another traditional function for prints over the years was that of graphically documenting current events. In the days before mass-produced photography, television and the Internet, it was mainly through the medium of printmaking that people were able to see images of events that happened outside their direct experience.

Advances in printmaking processes moved quickly in the nineteenth century. Around mid- century, newspapers illustrated with wood engravings became hugely popular. Wood engravings could be printed from the same press as typeface, and with the development of procedures for quickly and easily taking a manuscript image and turning it into an engraving, it became practical to produce newspapers copiously filled with up-to-date illustrations.

Beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century, steel began to replace copper as the medium for producing engraved images. The harder steel plate allowed for finer detail and a much higher number of impressions to be run off than from a copper plate. This drove down the price for producing prints, making it more practical for publishers to include engravings as illustrations in their books and magazines. The public responded avidly to these attractive and informative images, creating a large demand for illustrated magazines, histories, travels, gift books, and many other types of publications.

As the century progressed, another new process, lithography, gained prominence as the method for the production of illustrations. In lithography, an image can be drawn directly or transferred onto a limestone slab. Lithographs were easier and less expensive to create, so that as the century progressed, increasing numbers of book and magazine illustrations were produced by this process.

In the nineteenth century, there was one American printmaker above all who could accurately read the mood of the public and respond by producing prints that would sell-Nathaniel Currier. Currier became "America's Printmaker," issuing popular prints for the public in such numbers that his firm became the most successful and prolific American print publisher by the middle of the century. Early in his career, Currier had his biggest sales with prints documenting disasters-fires, floundering boats, train wrecks and the like-and to a great extent the success of his business was founded on the production of graphic images of these tragedies. His hand-colored lithograph, Great Conflagration at Pittsburgh, PA., 1845, is a wonderful example.

Pittsburgh's first resident lithographer, William Schuchman, immigrated to Pittsburgh from Germany as a young man and opened his lithographic publishing company in 1849. In 1859, he produced one of the most attractive and successful frameable prints of the city, View of Pittsburgh, PA. This elegant lithograph contains a scene of Pittsburgh from Mt. Washington set within an oval framework. The city is shown as prosperous and busy, the rivers teaming with steam ships and smoke wafting from numerous factory smokestacks. By 1871, Pittsburgh was gaining a national reputation as a paradigm of the new industrial America, and Charles Stanley Reinhart's wood engravings for Harper's Weekly make this point graphically.

In the later 1800s, a method was developed, known as chromolithography, to print multicolored lithographs in large quantities. Edwin Rowe's chromolithograph, Great Battle of Homestead. Defeat & Capture of the Pinkerton Invaders July 6th 1892, illustrates this historic event in colorful vignettes arranged around a central image, leaving no doubt as to the artist's and publishers' sympathies.

A visually marvelous exhibition, A Panorama of Pittsburgh celebrates the city, with a panoply of images-including many iconic renderings of the Point, Pittsburgh's distinctive hillsides, buildings, and newsworthy events that mark our past and present. Together, this variety of imagery, which ranges from the bucolic to the political, from advertising imagery to detailed bird's-eye views, forms a panorama of Pittsburgh's history and development from frontier town to industrial icon.

This exhibition is organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center. Major support for this exhibition and catalogue is provided by the Allegheny Foundation and The Pittsburgh Foundation. Generous support is also provided by Eichleay Foundation, Mine Safety Appliances, and Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation.

Catalogue
Fully-illustrated, with an essay by Guest Curator Christopher W. Lane that ties the more than 130 exhibition prints into a thematic chronology, the catalogue also will include a list of Pittsburgh-based printers and a complete list of the over four-hundred nineteenth-century historic views of Pittsburgh that Mr. Lane documented while working on the exhibition. The 224-page catalogue, distributed by University of Pittsburgh Press, is intended to be a long-lived reference for historians, print-collectors, and curators.

Guest curator Lane is an expert on antique prints, maps and books, and is well known as an appraiser on the popular PBS series Antiques Road Show. He is the co-owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop, Ltd., purveyors of antique prints, maps and related books. He founded the shop in 1982 with Donald H. Cresswell. Mr. Lane has authored a series of basic guides on print and map collecting, including "What Is A Print?" "A Guide To Collecting Antique Historical Prints," "A Guide To Collecting Antique Maps," and "A Guide to Collecting Currier and Ives Prints."

The Frick Art Museum
The Frick Art Museum at the Frick Art & Historical Center contains collections of fine and decorative arts assembled by Helen Clay Frick, daughter of Henry Clay Frick. In addition to exhibiting its permanent collection, which has strengths in Italian Renaissance and French eighteenth-century painting, the Museum has an active program of temporary exhibitions.

General Information
The Frick Art & Historical Center is located at 7227 Reynolds Street in Pittsburgh's Point Breeze neighborhood. Free parking is available in the Frick's off-street lot or along adjacent streets. The Frick is open 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday and closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission to The Frick Art Museum, Car and Carriage Museum, Greenhouse, and Playhouse is free.

Docent-led tours of A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views are available free of charge on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. Groups of five or more and those interested in scheduling a tour of the permanent collection are requested to schedule a private tour at an alternate time. The cost for group tours of the exhibition and permanent collection is $7 per person, and reservations must be made one to two weeks in advance. Call 412-371-0600, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Monday-Sunday.

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