The Art of Lithography: Images of Woodstock
By Matthew Powers
Images have been an integral part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. A case in point is the depiction of a wild pig, considered the oldest known cave painting, which is over 45,000 years old. Images over this vast time reflected daily lives, cultural expression, and beliefs of some higher power or spiritual entity.
Over the last few hundred years, humans have found ways to expedite the disbursement of such images, from the invention of printing presses to our modern devices. Nowadays we find that our lives are bombarded by pictures from a wide variety of sources on social media outlets like Facebook and Instagram. Many of us contribute to the image pool as we generally have a cell phone with a camera at arm’s reach. Long gone are the days of having to send away a film to have the negatives developed and the printed photographs sent back to us. Instead, we can take a series of digital photos, curate those images, and disburse them to the public sphere in a matter of seconds. We create, package, and write digestible stories for distant folk we know, hardly know, or know not at all.
Johann Alois Senefelder, an actor and playwright, must have thought the same way back in the 1790s. At the time, Johann had fallen into debt due to problems with the printing of one of his plays. He could not afford to publish his new play so he began experimenting with several techniques that led to the first planograhic* process in printing. Johann essentially led the way for what we do nowadays; he came up with a quick way to get out his images and associated stories.
*“Planographic printing means printing from a flat surface, as opposed to a raised surface or incised surface. Lithography and offset lithography are planographic processes that rely on the property that water will not mix with oil. The image is created by applying a tushe (greasy substance) to a plate or stone. (The term lithography comes from litho, for stone, and -graph to draw.) Certain parts of the semi-absorbent surface being printed on can be made receptive to ink while others (the blank parts) reject it.” “His invention of lithography allowed artists to draw their original artwork on a limestone surface with a grease crayon and then economically print multiple copies. Lithography quickly spread across Europe and into America.” Wikipedia.
By the 19th century, the market for printed images expanded as the cost for lithographs was relatively low compared to other engraving types. Commentators of the time also extolled the virtues of such images, and lithographers began to print images that would “appeal to homeowners and other purchasers such as owners of hotels and other meeting spaces. Popular subjects included portraits of public figures, town and city views, landscapes (particularly images of those places that became part of “landscape tourism”), political prints, public buildings including churches and schools, genre images, and sentimental and religious imagery. The same lithographers who issued such prints might also work on commission producing illustrations for books, advertising prints and ephemera of all kinds; some, notably Currier & Ives focused on issuing prints for display.” Commercial nineteenth century American Lithography
We have several lithographic images from the 19th century in the collection of the Woodstock History Center. They are focused on the buildings and landscape (the Green or what was previously referred to as “The Park”) of the village. The two images of “Woodstock Park” date to approximately the 1850s. The image of the Phoenix Block likely dates to just after 1861. The previous building had burned down and this new block was being highlighted as an achievement.
Colored lithograph of Woodstock Park
Many prints such as this were passed along an assembly line of workers, mainly women and girls, who would apply a single tint. Inexpensive prints often had just one or two colors. Men were also employed as colorists and had the opportunity to work on finer prints and receive better pay. Some printers experimented with lithotints in which areas of color were applied by washes applied to separate stones. In this way, backgrounds, such as skies in landscape views, could be printed in color, rather than having a colorist do the work. Hand coloring could then be applied.
Lithography on Maps
There are also several lithographic images that can seen on the Windsor County Map made by Hosea Doten in 1855. It is a beautifully rendered map in the collection of the Woodstock History Center and contains images of places here in Woodstock.
