Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Daniel Francis McGrath

NAME:
- Daniel Francis McGrath

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (USA) (1966)

ADVISORS:
- Raymond L. Kilgour

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Wallace J. Bonk
- Howard H. Peckham
- Russell E. Bidlack

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: AMERICAN COLORPLATE BOOKS 1800-1900

Abstract:
This dissertation is an attempt to do for nineteenth

century American
colorplate books what Martin Hardie did for English

books with colored plates.
It consists of five narrative chapters that trace

the patterns of artists, engravers,
printers, subjects, and (especially) techniques that

shift across the pages of
American colorplate books of the last century. The

narrative is supplemented by
a bibliography of some 700 colorplate books; this

list is based on Whitman
Bennett's A Practical Guide to American Nineteenth

Century Color Plate Books.

The earliest American colorplate books were

illustrated with hand-colored
copperplate engravings. William Russell Birch and

John Hill stand out above the
other artists and engravers of the early years.

Their work is informed by the
spirit of the eighteenth century. About 1830 the

hand-colored lithograph displaced
the hand-colored copperplate. James Otto Lewis,

George Catl in, and
Charles Bird King form a trio of masters whose

Indian portraits were published as
hand-colored lithographic book illustrations. John

James Audubon is also a
genius of this generation, which came to flower in

the 1840's.
Color printing, in the form of tinted lithography,

which was a style of
decoration rather than an attempt at chromatic

representation, deve loped during
the 18401s and en joyed much vogue in the following

decade. The best of the
tinted illustrations appeared in the Government

reports of surveys and explorations.
The largest was the Pacific Railroad Report, for

which John Mix Stanley made the
greatest number of drawings. ,
Also in the 1840's. actually actually as early as

1841, full color lithographic printing,
called chromolithography, began to compete with

hand-coloring. Gift books,
chromolithographically decorated in a medieval

style, were very popular in the
early fifties. By the end of the Civil War,

chromolithography had eclipsed all
other methods of color reproduction. The yearS from

the close of the Civil War to
the turn of the century were the golden years of

chromolithography: the first age
of a broad sPectrum and heavy volume of colorplate

books.
The 1890's saw the emergence of the trichromatic

halftone, growing out of
such experiments as photo lithogrophy, hand-coloring

photographures, and trichromatic
chromo lithography The twentieth century reaped the

rewards of experiment
that conquered the ancient system of hand-coloring

and made 'possible a large
number of books with colorplates that were, for the

first time, accurately representational
and quickly produced.

MPACT Scores for Daniel Francis McGrath

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:18:26

Advisors and Advisees Graph