Half Day at Huntington Library

This time we visited 'Drawn to Satire: John Sloan’s Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Paul de Kock' and 'The Color Explosion: Nineteenth Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection'.

From 1903 to 1905, American artist John Sloan created 53 etchings to illustrate comic novels by French author Charles Paul de Kock. The books—satires of French society in the first half of the 19th century, full of slapstick violence—were a perfect subject for Sloan’s lively etching style of short, expressive lines and loose cross-hatching. The project also seemed to inspire Sloan to look at 20th-century New Yorkers with the same satirical eye that de Kock trained on Parisians of the previous century. In the years that followed, Sloan produced a number of etchings featuring humorous vignettes of life in the busy metropolis. A selection of Sloan’s etchings as well as related prints, drawings, and books will be on view, inviting close study of Sloan’s working methods as he was becoming a prominent member of the band of urban realists known as the Ashcan school.

When a young German playwright named Alois Senefelder developed a new printmaking process in the 1790s, little did he know that his discovery would start a communication revolution. Lithography, or flat-surface printing, transformed the exchange of information and the behavior of everyday life for the next century and beyond. This technique brought art, literature, music, and science to the masses; gave rise to product advertising and consumer culture; educated a growing middle class; and turned commercial printing from a craft into an industry. Lithography also colorized a predominantly black-and-white print world.

The Color Explosion presents more than 200 examples of 19th-century American lithography from The Huntington’s Jay T. Last Collection of Lithographic and Social History. Advertising posters, art prints, calendars, certificates, children’s books, color-plate illustrations, historical views, product labels, sales catalogs, sheet music, toys & games, and trade cards are just some of the artifacts included in this comprehensive exhibition.