Laid Down on Paper, Printmaking in America, 1800-1865 awarded the 2021 Ewell L. Newman Book Award, American Historical Print Collectors Society

Laid Down on Paper, Printmaking in America, 1800-1865 has been awarded the 2021 Ewell L. Newman Book Award by the American Historical Print Collectors Society. Published by the Cape Ann Museum in 2020, the book contains papers presented at a symposium organized in conjunction with the Museum’s 2017 exhibition, Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane. The Award is given annually and recognizes outstanding publications that enhance appreciation of American prints and printmakers.

Fitz Henry Lane has long been recognized as one of America’s most important painters of the mid-19th century. Lane’s success as a printmaker, however, and his life-long fascination with the medium is something that is not widely recognized. The exhibition catalogue of the show and the recent book Laid Down on Paper, Printmaking in America 1800-1865 investigate this important part of Lane’s career. The essays in Laid Down on Paper explore such diverse topics as how race and race relations were portrayed in printing in the period following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863; the role women artists and artisans played in printmaking during the nineteenth century; and how the rise of industrialization in towns such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, affected the careers of Fitz Henry Lane and other printers. 

Laid Down on Paper contains essays by seven print scholars: Helena E. Wright; Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire; Joan Irving; Rebecca Szantyr; Ellen R. Sondag; Christine Garnier; and Margaretta M. Lovell. The introduction was written by Georgia B. Barnhill, curator of the Lane lithograph exhibition; Caroline Sloat served as editor.

Copies of Laid Down on Paper are available through the Cape Ann Museum Shop. The exhibition catalog which accompanied the exhibition Drawn from Nature & On Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane is also available through the Museum Shop.

– M. Oaks
August 5, 2021