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The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century
American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection
October 17, 2009 - February 22,
2010
The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens highlights the largest private collection
of color lithography in the United States with 
the
exhibition "The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography
from the Jay T. Last Collection," on view October 17, 2009 - Februrary
22, 2010, in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. Color lithography revolutionized
the printing industry in 19th century America and brought art, literature,
and music to the masses. The exhibition features about 250 objects, including
advertising posters, art prints, calendars, children's books, product labels,
sales catalogs, sheet music, toys and games, and trade cards. (right:
California & Oregon Stage Company advertising poster, lithographed by
Britton & Rey (San Francisco), ca. 1870. The Huntington Library, Art
Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © The Huntington)
The Jay T. Last collection -- about 135,000 objects in
all -- has never before been on public view, and is a promised gift to The
Huntington. "The collection opens a wide window onto the developing
field of graphic arts as a means of expressing cultural ideas," says
David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library.
Lithography was invented in the 1790s by Alois Senefelder,
a young German playwright who sought a cheaper and faster way to publish
his plays. Unlike copper engraving or woodblock printing, the newer printmaking
process did not require any cutting into metal or wood. Basically, an image
was drawn with a greasy crayon onto a flat block of limestone. The lithographer
applied water to the stone and then a layer of ink. The ink adhered to the
greasy surface but nowhere else, as the lithographer then pressed paper
against the block to produce an image.
"The printing technique was a great achievement,"
says David Mihaly, curator of the exhibition and curator of lithographic
history and ephemera at The Huntington," but its full impact wasn't
felt until color entered the picture in the mid-19th century."
Early in the 19th century lithographers used only black
ink and recruited workers to Hand color illustrations for books. American
print shops started applying multiple colors beginning in the 1840s, leading
to the proliferation of color on book illustrations, sheet music, and maps.
By the 1870s, salesmen were pitching products using graphic trade cards
and catalogs, and women and men alike beautified their homes with purchases
of color prints, city views, posters, and wall calendars. (left:
"American Autumn," lithographed by Thomas Sinclair (Philadelphia),
1867. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. ©
The Huntington)
The exhibition shows the veritable explosion of color that
filtered to consumers in mid-19th century America. Among the items on view
will be a sampling of lithography that found its way to the shelves of general
stores, including labels from food cans, cigar boxes, and fruit crates.
The invention of lithography has a direct link to the early history of branding
and advertising, as manufacturers and merchants began to recognize the powerful
appeal of a package over the actual product. Generic goods in barrels, jars,
bins, and sacks were replaced by brand name products in boxes, cans, cartons,
and wrappers. Color lithographed labels provided crucial identification
and promotion in a sea of consumer choices.
Lithography not only changed the way consumers interpreted
the world but also the way merchants constructed the space for selling products.
On cigar boxes, for example, large labels were pasted inside lids that were
then opened and displayed on shelves and counters in tobacco shops, saloons,
and hotels. Smaller labels on exterior lids and sides provided easy identification
when boxes were closed. Cigar box labels remained a staple of lithographic
production until American consumers traded cigars for cigarettes in the
early 1900s and the need for labels shrank with the package size.
Color lithography dramatically altered a publishing world
that had previously been constricted by the limits of hand coloring. Natural
history books of mammals, birds, fish, flowers, and fruit abounded -- gift
books with color lithographed frontispieces and presentation pages commonly
appeared -- and frequent texts about scientific treatises, medical reports,
government land surveys, and architecture made special use of color to convey
complex information. (right: Product label for Yule Tide Brand Oranges,
lithographed by Los Angeles Lithographic Co., ca. 1895. The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © The Huntington)
Lithographers also applied their skills to the depiction
of current events. As advances in printing accelerated production and lowered
costs, lithographed prints became popular news sources and helped launch
the field of pictorial journalism. In one of the earlier examples of this
trend, New York lithographer Henry Robinson produced Battle of Buena Vista
shortly after that 1847 Mexican-American War confrontation.
"In short, color lithography transformed American
culture," says Mihaly. The ubiquity of examples from the Last Collection
extends to seed catalogs, sheet music, and toys and games. The well- known
game pioneer Milton Bradley got his start as a lithographer. In the early
1860s, he created and printed a simple lithographed board game called The
Checkered Game of Life. Bradley continued as a general lithographer of labels,
posters, and book illustrations but also became one of America's biggest
game manufacturers by the 1870s and helped launch the American toy industry.
Education Room
The exhibition includes an education room featuring printing
demonstrations, a tools and techniques station, and an interactive spin-the-wheel
game. Children and families will have an opportunity to learn about the
five major stages of lithographic production: stone preparation, drawing
on stone, application of water and ink, printing, and cleaning the stone
for the next job. An antique lithographic press will be on display in the
main gallery.
Jay T. Last
Collector Jay T. Last, a physicist and founder of Fairchild
Semiconductor Corp., is also an independent scholar of the history of lithography.
His 
award-winning book The
Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Hillcrest
Press, 2005) will serve as the exhibition catalog. Last's promised gift
to The Huntington will serve as a significant scholarly resource in social
history as well as the history of commercial advertising and the graphic
arts. When combined with The Huntington's other holdings in graphic arts
-- European and American printmaking, book illustration, and design photography
(particularly of California and the West) and cartography -- the vastness
of the material makes the Library an important center for scholarship in
the field. (right: Advertising poster for Mandeville & King Superior
Flower Seeds, illustrated by Louis Rhead (New York), ca. 1895. The Huntington
Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © The Huntington)
Jay T. Last is considered one of the "fathers"
of Silicon Valley. Born in Butler, Penn., in 1929, he graduated from the
University of Rochester in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in optics and earned
his doctorate in physics from MIT in 1956. Last then worked for William
Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize for his role in the invention of
the transistor. In 1957, Last and seven other scientists and engineers left
Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., the firm that
produced the first planar silicon diffused transistors. Fairchild helped
establish Silicon Valley as a center for technological innovation and entrepreneurialism.
At Fairchild, Last directed the group that produced the first integrated
circuit chips. In 1961, Last left Fairchild to start Amelco Semiconductor
as a division of Teledyne, Inc. A few years later he became the vice president
of technology for the parent company in Los Angeles.
As Last was working in Silicon Valley, he also pursued
his passion for collecting. He began acquiring African Art in the early
1960s. An interest in fruit-box labels in the 1970s sparked a passion for
color lithography that would lead to his amassing about 135,000 printed
items, most of them created in 19th-century America when techniques in lithographic
color printing were rapidly developing. Last's collection is rich in books,
advertising posters, product labels, sheet music covers, trade cards, historical
prints, railroad ephemera, and city views from this era. In 2006 he announced
his plans to donate to The Huntington the entire collection, which is now
being transferred and cataloged. Last also has provided funds to support
a curator of lithographic history and ephemera.
Last's interest in the history of lithography extends to
his own independent scholarship. He is the author of The Color Explosion:
Nineteenth-Century American Lithography; he is co-author, with Gordon McClelland,
of five other books: California Orange Box Labels, Fruit Box Labels,
The California Style, California Watercolor Artists 1925-1950,
and California Watercolors 1850-1970.
Last is also a founder and member of the board of directors
of the Archaeological Conservancy, a national nonprofit organization established
in 1980 to preserve archaeological sites in the United States. The conservancy,
based in Albuquerque, N.M., has helped preserve more than 300 sites in 39
states. In 1999, Last received the Hutchison Medal from the University of
Rochester. The award is given annually to a graduate for achievements in
business and community service, along with distinguished service to the
university. In 2005, he won the Maurice Rickards Award from the Ephemera
Society of America for his important contributions to the field of ephemera
studies. In 2007 he received the Newman Award for the outstanding book of
the year dealing with print studies from the American Historical Print Collectors
Society for The Color Explosion. Last lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., with
his wife, Deborah.
THE LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT THE HUNTINGTON:
The Huntington Library is one of the largest and most complete
independent research libraries in the United States in its fields of specialization.
Only a tiny portion of its collection, composed of approximately 6 million
items, is on display at any one time in the Library's Main Exhibition Hall
and Dibner Hall of the History of Science. To provide visitors with more
access to its holdings, the institution regularly presents changing exhibitions
in the West Hall of the Library and the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery.
Some 1,400 scholars come from around the world every year to conduct advanced
humanities research using The Huntington's collections. Through a rigorous
peer-review program, The Huntington awards approximately 125 grants annually
to scholars in the fields of history, literature, art, and the history of
science.
Manuscripts
The Huntington's holdings include manuscripts representing
English and American history and literature from the 11th century to the
present, including European medieval manuscripts, Renaissance exploration
and cartography, Latin American history, and the history of science and
technology. Particular strengths include Middle English literature, English
politics and law in the Early Modern era, the English aristocracy from the
later Middle Ages through the 18th century, American colonial history, 18th-century
British and American military history, the American Revolution, the Civil
War, the exploration and development of the AmericanWest, and California
from its discovery to the present. English and American literary collections
from the Renaissance to the present are especially strong in material relating
to 18th-century Britain, Victorian literature and the pre-Raphaelites, American
literature in the second half of the 19th century, and theater and drama
covering some 500 years.
A selection of the most famous and interesting items from
the manuscript collections are on public display in the Library's Main Exhibition
Hall. These include illuminated Books of Hours, the Ellesmere manuscript
of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Renaissance maps, letters and documents by
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau's autograph manuscript
of Walden, records of the California missions, and manuscripts by Jack London,
Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and Charles Bukowski.
Rare Books
The collection includes printed books from the 15th through
the 20th centuries as well as maps, broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and
many other printed formats. The approximately 410,000 items are concentrated
in the field of British and American culture with many topics and periods
covered in extraordinary depth.
The Huntington copy of Johann Gutenberg's Bible is one
of 11 surviving copies printed on vellum, and one of three such copies in
the United States. It was the first substantial book printed with movable
type in the West. Printed about 1450-55 in Mainz, Germany, the Bible is
in Latin, in the standard medieval Catholic version known as the Vulgate.
The Huntington has the second-largest collection of incunabula in the United
States, after the Library of Congress. The term designates books printed
before 1501 during the infancy, or "in the cradle," of the new
technology of the printing press.
One of the Library's most prized works is the first folio
edition of William Shakespeare's collected plays, published in 1623, seven
years after his death. The first folio contains 36 plays, 18 of them printed
for the first time. This "authorized version," prepared by his
friends and colleagues from "true originall copies," is the prime
source of knowledge of Shakespeare's texts.
Photographs
The Huntington Library houses approximately 500,000 prints
and negatives spanning 1850 to 1950. This collection, which covers a variety
of topics from the American Civil War to the building of the transcontinental
railroad, from "Grand Tours" of Europe to modest family photograph
albums, is particularly strong in depicting the history and development
of the American West. Within this broad regional focus are photographs generated
by the great surveys of the American West conducted in the 19th century,
commissioned by both railroad corporations and the federal government.
The Huntington traditionally has collected the work of
noted photographers, most of whom were active professionally at the end
of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th. The collection contains
significant bodies of work by Carleton Watkins, Carl Moon, Frederick Monsen,
Edward Curtis, Alfred A. Hart, F. Jay Haynes, William Henry Jackson, Adam
Clark Vroman, Andrew Russell, Eadweard Muybridge, C. C. Pierce, Frances
Benjamin Johnston, Edward Weston, and others.
In recent years The Huntington has acquired the collections
of several commercial photographers whose work documents various phases
in the history of Southern California and elsewhere. These include the J.
Allen Hawkins collection of Pasadena (1910-60), the "Dick" Whittington
collection of the development of Southern California in the postwar boom
years, the B. D. Jackson collection depicting the developing suburbs of
Los Angeles, and the Maynard Parker collection documenting the modern home
and garden in mid-20th century Southern California.
Historical Prints
The historical print collection at The Huntington consists
of more than 250,000 images that depict aspects of British and American
cultural and political life between the 16th and 19th centuries. Produced
as separately issued prints and in extra-illustrated books are portraits,
historical scenes and events, political and social caricatures, theatrical
and literary history, illustrations to Shakespeare's plays, biblical illustrations,
British and American views, and British and American trade cards.
The print collection also is rich in portraiture and iconographic
figures and is representative of the history and technical development of
printmaking processes through the mid-20th century. This includes a selection
of tools and equipment involved in early printmaking. Finally, the collection
also includes the work of various well-known engravers and the output of
key American, British, and European publishers.
Ephemera
Printed ephemera, that body of material that was produced
for a one-time, limited purpose, can be understood generally as transient
documents of everyday life. The Huntington's collection of ephemera is an
expansive archive of several hundred thousand pieces. The variety of subjects
and formats represented in the larger collection support historical research
in the fields of American and British cultural studies. The collection emphasizes
Western history and culture, especially that of Southern California.
Formats include but are not limited to citrus crate labels,
campaign buttons, scrapbooks, maps, sheet music, promotional literature,
postcards, playbills, and posters. Subjects include but are not limited
to American politics, the development of Southern California, theater and
performing arts history, 20th-century American railroads, and commerce and
advertising.
Noteworthy collections include the L. E. Behymer archive
of early Southern California cultural events, the Diana Korzenik collection
of art education ephemera, the John Haskell Kemble collection of maritime
ephemera, and the Jay T. Last collection of lithographic and social history.
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