ARTHUR F. TAIT

The Currier & Ives firm became an important patron of Arthur Tait, commissioning forty-two paintings for publication between 1852 and 1865. Among these, two large folio series—American Field Sports and American Hunting Scenes—depicted the activities of hunters and fishermen in upstate New York, a region Tait visited every summer. The large storytelling pictures were handsomely colored by hand and heavily advertised by the publishers, defining Tait’s reputation as a successful painter of narrative sporting scenes for years to come.

COLLABORATIONS AND CONFLICTS WITH PUBLISHERS: CURRIER & IVES VS. LOUIS PRANG & CO.

As a child in England, Arthur Tait was sent to live on his aunt’s farm near Lancaster. It was there, he recalled, that he developed the fondness for animals, hunting, and fishing that would become the driving force behind his artistic creativity in America. In New York, he visited the Adirondack Mountains to paint animal life and produced some of the early compositions that attracted the attention of patrons and critics at the National Academy. Camping in the Woods, published by Currier & Ives in 1863, represents one of Tait’s trips. The scene includes John Osborn, a prosperous importer of liquors and wines and early patron of the artist who bought many of his pictures and resold them to friends, thus acting as Tait’s agent and amateur dealer.

Aware of his own strengths and limitations as well as the fact that one learns from seeing others at work, Tait worked on at least twenty-four compositions with a Düsseldorf-trained landscape painter named James McDougal Hart. Such a collaborative approach was a direct extension of practices Tait had learned in the lithographic workshop, where artists often devoted themselves to specialized tasks.

This collaboration in painting, however, created public controversy in New York. A writer at the New York Morning Express claimed that A Tight Fix‒Bear Hunting, Early Winter, the source for A Tight Fix, was not entirely by Tait’s hand. Not everyone agreed that originality and artistic excellence were incompatible with collaboration. A writer at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper defended the opposite stance: “It is very desirable that Tait should continue to paint cattle in Hart’s landscapes, but it is equally desirable that whenever Tait borrows the aid of Hart, the entire landscape should be painted by Hart’s hand.”

Tait’s collaboration with Currier & Ives was not without conflict either. The firm’s publication of The Cares of a Family led to a falling out between the two in 1865. Ten years earlier, the publishers had issued a large folio print of one of Tait’s paintings depicting a family of quails with a brood of eleven chicks. It was widely popular, so the firm, following their usual practice, decided to reissue the picture in a smaller and cheaper version. The resulting print, a companion to Infant Brood (see below), was aimed at a less discerning audience. It was not as carefully drawn and lacked the refined coloring of the earlier print. Tait, who had not been consulted, was outraged at the unauthorized appropriation of one of his pictures. What especially upset him, however, was not that Currier & Ives reused an earlier composition—there was no copyright for paintings in America until 1865, and Currier & Ives owned the copyright of the earlier print—but rather that his signature had been prominently inserted into the image.

During the 1860s, Tait sent his paintings to cities outside New York. In Boston they were exhibited at Williams & Everett, a firm that ran a free art gallery. It was probably there that a small painting of chicks, similar to the one exhibited here, attracted the attention of Louis Prang (1824–1909), founder of the lithographic firm Louis Prang & Co. In 1865 Prang had recently returned from a trip to Germany, where he studied the latest technique in color lithography in an effort to improve the methods of chromolithography for fine arts reproduction. A print based on Tait’s painting Chicks was Prang’s first success. Prang’s “chromos,” as such prints would later be nicknamed, were so perfect an imitation of the colors, texture, and surface of the painter’s brush strokes that they sparked a debate among art critic Clarence Cook, Tait, and Prang.

While Prang believed in technology’s mission to disseminate good art through an affordable but perfected reproductive print, Cook asserted that the new lithographs were deceptive facsimiles that would confuse audiences, making them unable to discern the true nature of the artwork. Tait sided with Prang, asking nevertheless that, as artist, his name be identified on the print while that of the lithographer be consigned to the lower margins of the image. Later the painter admitted that the more popular Prang’s chromolithographs became, the less he found buyers for his small paintings. Maternal Love is the last known collaboration between Tait and Prang.