Maurice Sendak was a Caldecott award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. The Brooklyn native illustrated more than 80 books by other authors before writing one himself: in 1963 he turned the children’s book world upside down with his first masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak’s dark, moody illustrations were a shocking contrast to the comparatively light and happy fare typically found in children’s books of the time. The main character, Max, like many of Sendak’s protagonists, acted like a real child, not some idealized version of youth. During his long career, Sendak wrote and illustrated more than 50 books, including Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside over There (1981). Sendak designed sets and costumes for stage versions of his books, and in the early 1980s created the sets for several operas, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Houston Grand Opera. He also collaborated with Carole King on the musical Really Rosie, producing the book, lyrics, and artwork.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, December, 2018.

Frank Weston Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1862. He studied at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston and the Academie Julian in Paris. Benson was a hunter and often depicted sporting scenes of birds in his artwork. The landscape around his studio on North Haven Island, Maine provided inspiration for his etchings and paintings. Benson taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the Society of Art in Portland, Maine.

Information courtesy of Harlowe-Powell Auction, July 2011.

A leading figure in American art at the end of the 19th century, Frank W. Benson earned renown in his own lifetime as one of the principle artists of the Boston school, and as a member of the influential group of painters called “The Ten.” Despite the acclaim he received from his contemporaries, Benson led a largely private life, devoted to his family, his friends and his art. The artist’s children served as his favorite models and Benson’s paintings of his family are among his most successful achievements.

Born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, Benson received his earliest artistic training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his classmates included Willard Metcalf, Robert Reid and Edward Simmons. In the fall of 1883, Benson left Boston for Paris, where he spent three years studying art at the Academie Julian. The years following Benson’s return to Boston were eventful ones for the young artist, punctuated by his marriage to Ellen Perry Peirson in October of 1888 and his appointment as an instructor at the Museum School in April 1889.

His teaching career provided Benson with a steady income to support his growing family, but also left the artist plenty of time to paint; Benson’s work of this period consisted primarily of formal portraits and landscapes painted during his summers spent with close friends Edmund Tarbell and Abbott Thayer in New Hampshire.

Benson’s discovery of North Haven Island, off the coast of Maine, marked a turning point in both the artist’s personal and professional development. On his first visit in 1900, Benson was enchanted by the brilliant sunlight that spilled over the island’s open fields and the sweeping views of the sea and sky beyond. The Benson family returned to North Haven every summer thereafter, eventually purchasing Wooster Farm, a rambling Federal style farmhouse and barn set in the midst of grassy meadows and bordered on three sides by the sea.

In North Haven, with the barn converted into a studio and the old house brimming over with the Benson’s children and friends, Wooster Farm became an idyllic retreat for the artist. Free from competing influences, Benson’s individual style finally emerged. Nearly everyday was spent outdoors, berry-picking, picnicking on the beach, fishing or sailing, affording the artist the opportunity to paint his favorite subjects – his children – en plein air.

Information courtesy of Sotheby’s, December, 2008.

The decorative arts world has many “squishy” and vague vocabulary words, but few are “squishier” and vaguer than cartouche. Originally, the term comes from Egyptology and is used to describe a oval enclosing hieroglyphics and having a horizontal line at one end. (The line denotes royalty.) The oval had significance not unlike that of a closed circle, in that it was believed that an oval around a person’s name provided protection to that person. The strong association with the god-like royalty of ancient Egypt and the “good luck charm” nature of the symbol meant that it was eventually co-opted by the rest of the population and, as a result, it appears on all manner of structures and objects from the era.

Centuries later, when Egypt was a land divided constantly by conflicts, soldiers, seeing these ovals everywhere, are said to have found them to resemble the paper cartridges used in muskets. The French word for cartridge is cartouche and thus it became, in its original use, the term applied to this particular hieroglyphic element.

A Civil War-era example of a paper cartridge. (p4A item # D9865000)

Sterling silver vase with blank cartouche. (p4A item # E8906323)

Page and Book Sizes

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can at least tell its size, but to do that, you have to know a little bit about the printing process, which basically, at least when it comes to paper sizes, has two eras: the modern era and the hand press era. In the hand press era (pre-1820, for the most part), printing was done on large sheets, on both sides, and then the sheets were folded and stitched along the folds. (The spatial reasoning necessary to lay out a sheet’s worth of printing, knowing which way the text would appear and the pages would be ordered when folded, is impressive.) Each set of pages created from the same folded sheet was called a gathering and multiple gatherings would all be bound together to create the finished book. Sometimes the edges of the gathering were trimmed on the three exposed sides, but in early books, you might have to use a knife to slice through the folds of the gathering to separate each page yourself.

In this system of printing, page sizes were determined by how many times the original sheet was folded. A folio (2° or fo) would been folded once, down the center, and with two pages of text printed on either side, it would create four printed pages. This is designated as the “format” of the book. Quartos (4° or 4to) would be folded twice to produce four leaves/eight pages, octavos (8° or 8vo), three times for eight leaves/16 pages, etc., with the sizes continuing through duodecimo (twelvemo – 12° or 12vo), sextodecimo (sixteenmo – 16° or 16vo), octodecimo (eighteenmo – 18° or 18vo), trigesimo-secundo (thirty-twomo – 32° or 32vo), quadragesimo-octavo (forty-eightmo – 48° or 48vo) and sexagesimo-quarto (sixty-fourmo – 64° or 64vo).

One challenge with deciphering this is that in the hand press age in particular paper sizes were not typically standardized or, if they were, it was only within a particular region or country of manufacture. As a result, sizes of quartos, for example, can vary because while all quartos have gatherings that are folded twice, the size of the original sheet can vary. This means that quartos printed in Italy and quartos printed in England in the same time period can be different sizes.

In modern production, sizes are standardized and most books are quartos or octavos. There are designations for less typical sizes as well, which are heard more commonly in reference to prints than books: elephant folio, atlas folio and double elephant folio. As with all paper objects, condition is paramount, with size playing the largest role when it comes to prints but little role at all with books. In fact, most sellers do not give physical dimensions for books, as historically, much like today, books were not printed in multiple sizes at the same time and the other information: place of publication, year, etc., is more useful to collectors. Determining the rarity of books typically has more to do with when and where they were printed and what edition a volume is than the size, although of course, this does not necessarily apply when the books are out of the traditional size range. And books do not change sizes as prints can, so….

Print Sizes

Robert Riviere (1808 to 1882), born the son of a drawing master and the brother of artists, apprenticed as a bookseller and binder in London. In 1829, he established himself as a seller and binder in Bath, and in 1840, he removed to London and focused solely on bookbinding. His skill was recognized by both nobility and royalty, receiving commissions from Queen Victoria, exhibiting at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, and binding a special edition of the Crystal Palace Exhibition catalog presented to royals from throughout Europe. He was also chosen to rebind the Domesday Book.

Charles Dickens, Dealing with the Firm of Dombey and Son. London; Bradbury & Evans, 1848. (p4A item # E8949779)

Books bound (or rebound) by any incarnation of the Riviere bindery are highly sought after, and can command significant prices at auction. They are typically of colorful morocco (goatskin) and elaborately gilt-stamped, sometimes including pictorial designs on the boards. One of the most popular types of Riviere binding is referred to as a Cosway binding because they include inset miniature portraits on ivory inspired by the noted British miniaturist Richard Cosway (1742 to 1821). John H. Stonehouse (1864 to 1937) developed this binding at the bookselling firm of Henry Sotheran and Company. He selected Riviere to create the bindings and Mrs. C.B. Currie to execute the miniatures, beginning in the early 20th century.

Most Riviere bindings are stamped, and based on the stamp, they can usually be dated as follows:

“Bound by R. Riviere, Bath” refers to 1829 to 1832

“Bound by R. Riviere” refers to 1832 to 1840

“Bound by Riviere” refers to 1840 to circa 1860

“Bound by Riviere & Son” refers to 1880 to circa 1939

“Bound by Bayntun & Riviere, Bath, England” refers to 1939 and later

Frederick Maxfield Parrish was born July 25, 1870 in Philadelphia to Stephen Parrish, an American artist famous for his landscapes, illustrations and engravings and his wife Elizabeth Bancroft Parrish. It’s not surprising that, finding himself surrounded by the tools of his father’s trade, that Frederick (he would begin to use Maxfield as his name later in life) would begin to draw to amuse himself. Around 1881, the Parrish family traveled to Europe, and during the trip, Frederick contracted typhoid. It was during his recuperation that he turned his attention to art in earnest under his father’s tutelage.

Maxfield studied widely as a young man, abroad in England and France, and at home at Haverford College, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Drexel Institute, where he had the opportunity to work with Howard Pyle, one of the greatest illustrators in American history. While at the Drexel Institute, he also met Lydia Austin, a young instructor, who he would marry in 1895. Parrish himself found work as an illustrator, working in Philadelphia until 1898, by which time his various magazine illustrations for publications and his burgeoning career as the illustrator, especially of children’s books (for authors such as L. Frank Baum and Kenneth Grahame), allowed the young couple to purchase a home, The Oaks, near his parents in New Hampshire.

A Maxfield Parrish-illustrated copy of Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens. (p4A item # D9749561)

Susan was initially hired to assist Lydia Parrish with the care of the Parrish children. (Perhaps due to Maxfield’s health concerns, the Parrishes waited until relatively late in life, for the time, to have children, with Lydia being almost 40 when their youngest child was born.) Susan quickly became Maxfield’s model and assistant, and eventually, they began an affair. Estranged from Lydia, who continued to live in the main house on the property, Maxfield ultimately moved into his studio where he lived with Susan.

Print of Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak, one of the many works for which Susan Lewin served as a model. (p4A item # D9972315)

Susan certainly must have served as a muse, because Parrish’s popularity skyrocketed in the years between 1905 and 1920. His art was in demand by publishers (he did dozens of covers for Collier’s) and advertisers from Colgate to Oneida, and he also had murals commissioned by wealthy patrons like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Another mural, created in the Tiffany studio, incorporated 100,000 pieces of Tiffany glass, and drew the attention of Cyrus Curtis, the owner of the Saturday Evening Post, who commissioned a mural for the Post’s Philadelphia headquarters. (Many of Parrish’s murals still decorated the public spaces they were designed for, and visitors can see them in places as varied as the Curtis Building in Philadelphia and the St. Regis’s bar in New York.)

A Maxfield Parrish-designed tobacco tin for Old King Cole tobacco. (p4A item # B107122)

Success allowed him to shift his focus away from advertising by the mid-1920s. (He was so well-known that by 1925, it was estimated that 25% of the homes in America owned a Parrish print and the deep lapis lazuli blue he favored had become known as ‘Parrish blue’. Parrish chose to move toward painting works of art that reflected, in some ways, his first job as an illustrator, and in many ways, this is the era of work for which Parrish is best remembered, androgynous, mystical figures in fantasy landscapes. By 1931, he announced that he was changing directions yet again, concentrating this time on landscapes.

A Maxfield Parrish landscape, Winter Dusk, from 1943 (p4A item # C215356)

In 1953, Lydia, who had for the most part left Maxfield in 1911, died, and he was left alone with Susan. Susan, perhaps frustrated by Maxfield’s lack of interest in marrying her after so many years together, left to marry someone else in 1960, and it was at that point that Maxfield Parrish stopped painting at the age of 90. He remained at The Oaks in Plainfield, New Hampshire until his death at 95 on March 30, 1966.

Joan Miro lithograph, Signes Et Meteores, printed in colors, 1958, p4A item E8972489

Joan Miro was born in Barcelona, Spain, on April 20, 1893, the son of a watchmaker. From 1912 he studied at the Barcelona Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Gali. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Barcelona was a cosmopolitan, intellectual city with a craving for the new in art, music, and literature. But, it was not the place where great art was being made. That place was Paris, and Miro established himself there at the age of twenty-six. He made friends with Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Ernest Hemingway, Max Ernst, and Paul Klee and was accepted as a Surrealist, looking stronger as the years went by. He lived alone in Paris in total poverty, but every time he went out, he wore a monocle and white spats. He kept his brushes clean, waxed and polished the floor of his studio, and arranged his canvases in neat order.

Miro went about his career with orderly determination. He wrote to Picasso in 1929 that he was looking for a studio, a dealer, and a wife. That same year he married the daughter of family friends. Her name was Pilar Juncosa, and they were happily married and were together for fifty-four years. They had one daughter, Dolores. Miro was certainly the most distinguished painter of Catalonia; he was intensely proud of that fact. All of his work was conceived in Montroig (the site of his family’s farm). Most important of these was the painting named “The Farm” which did not sell in Paris and was finally sold to Ernest Hemingway for $250.

He was the most enduring of the Surrealist artists; he first visited the United States in 1947 to execute a mural commission at the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio with Alexander Calder. His reputation had preceded him, and he had already had enormous influence on such American artists as Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who had adopted his Surrealist automatism and mysterious primitive symbols for their own purposes. Miro had tried his hand at ceramics, bronze sculpture, printmaking, book illustration, posters, costume design, etc. He was seventy-nine years old when he began his series of monumental bronzes. When he was eighty, he joined forces with a young Spaniard named Josep Royo who was a weaver of tapestries. Miro would spread Royo’s tapestries on the floor and design changes, adding all kinds of materials, painting some areas, even burning areas. The result was a series called Sobreteixims. Miro transformed the Royo tapestries from admirable folk art into perhaps masterpieces. He died on Christmas Day in 1983 in Palma Majorca, where he had lived and worked for several years.

Information courtesy of Charlton Hall Galleries, February 2007

The word “Hoosier” is one of those words whose origins are lost to time. Even The Oxford English Dictionary offers no real guidance about where the word came from. What we do know is that “Hoosier” was first documented in the mid-1820s, and within a decade, it had entered general usage. John Finley, a Hoosier himself from Richmond, write a poem titled, “The Hoosier’s Nest” that was published in 1833, although his initial version uses “Hoosher.” This usage, along with many others from the period, indicate that Hoosier was most likely in oral usage for quite some time, as there appears to be no need to explain the term once it appears in print usage.

Speculation about the origins of the word began almost immediately, and a number of theories have been offered over the years. Perhaps the most widely accepted of these is from historian Jacob Piatt Dunn, Jr. Dunn pins the word’s origins on an old English dialect and the root “hoo,” which means high ground or a hill. Early usage of the word is not so specific to Indiana, but rather seems to refer to a backwoodsman or a mountain man – the kind of rough, hardy people who populated the early Appalachian frontier. For details and other theories, check out the Indiana Historical Bureau’s website and their article, “What is a Hoosier?” at http://www.in.gov/history/2612.htm.

“Hoosier” also pops up in references to the Hoosier Group, a group of Impressionist painters who were working during the late-19th/early-20th centuries. The core members of what came to be known as the Hoosier Group were T.C. (Theodore Clement) Steele, John Ottis Adams, William Forsyth, Otto Starke, and Richard B. Gruelle – all Indiana natives. Most of these young men studied together at the Indiana School of Art, with Steele, Adams and Forsyth later attending the Royal Academy of Munich, while Stark studied in Paris at the Academie Julian. Upon their return to Indiana, they realized that they had all developed a deeper appreciation for the natural beauty of their homeland, and they set about creating a nationally recognized style. While they all had their own strengths and painted a variety of subjects in a variety of styles, they were united by their “plein aire” renderings of the Indiana landscape. The group’s greatest recognition came when Indiana artists were given their own building at the 1904 World’s Fair, an accomplishment shared by no other state at the time.

A T.C. Steele oil-on-canvas painting of a wooded landscape. (p4A item # D9751709 )

Indiana artists took to the Impressionist movement in droves, finding inspiration in the rural landscape. As a result, one occasionally finds references to the Hoosier School or Indiana School, which is really a broad reference to Indiana art of the period. The Hoosier School generally refers to the Hoosier Group, exhibitors at the Hoosier Salon, the Brown County School or the Richmond School (a lesser-known community of mostly self-taught landscape painters). The frequent lack of distinction is due to the fact that all of these “schools” were in operation in the early twentieth century, that artists moved freely among them, and that their signature style and subject matter – impressionistic landscapes – were largely similar.

The Hoosier School gained ground in terms of respect and recognition in 1925, when the Daughters of Indiana formed the Hoosier Salon, with their first show held in Chicago’s Marshall Fields Galleries. T.C. Steele and John Ottis Adams were among the first exhibitors. After several years of critical and popular success, the show moved to Indianapolis, where it is still housed today in the galleries of the Indiana State Museum.

-Reference note by Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor – June 21, 2009

Further Recommended Reading

American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work by Susan Larkin

The House of the Singing Winds: The Life and Work of T. C. Steele by Selma N. & Theodore L. Steele, Wilbur D. Peat

Theodore Clement Steele: An American Master of Light by William H. Gerdts