Print Collection

J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Drawing Collection, Ephemera Collection, Photograph Collection, Print Collection

D1: 001
1989–2010
Mixed materials—including vintage prints, color snapshots, oil studies, finished drawings, process drawings, ink-jet printouts, flyers, and posters—ranging in size from 2 x 3 to 26 x 36 inches

D1:001 J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Richmond-based painter J. Bohannan was born in New York City in 1950 and moved with his family at age two to Hilton Village, Newport News, and later, as a teenager, to Hopewell. After studying art at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bohannan worked as a salesman in his father’s art supply store, selling his own original artwork on the side. By his own admission, his paintings of the time were derivative of the European high art and contemporary abstraction he had studied at RPI. Then one day he picked up a copy of Matthew Baigell’s The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (1974) from a discount book bin. Until then, Bohannan says, he had never really seen, much less studied, modern American painting, despite four years of formal art education.

D1:001 J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection

Working alongside street artists in Verona and Munich, copying famous Caravaggios and Bouchers in pastel on public sidewalks, Bohannan developed a passion for “plastic realism,” embedding human forms in visual space in a way that is, as Bohannan puts it, “more there than right”—that is, more materially … Read the rest

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H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection

Photograph Collection, Print Collection

C1: 068
1940–1941
178 photographs, 158 film negatives, 13 etchings

C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection (LVA 09_0869_019)

Courthouses were essential in establishing a sense of permanence and rule in early Virginia communities, being not only centers of legal and civic activity but venues for business and barter, playing host likewise to a spectrum of community-building social activities such as picnics and games. In the winter of 1940–1941, the Virginia-based Hirst Dillon Milhollen (1906–1970), an etcher by trade and chairman of the exhibits committee for the Washington Society of Etchers, photographed courthouses throughout the commonwealth, the only criterion for inclusion being that the courthouse had to predate 1871 in its construction. The following year, Milhollen privately printed Old Virginia Court Houses, a 100-edition loose-leaf portfolio whose etchings drew upon Milhollen’s own gathering of original photos.

Arrangement and access:
Alphabetical by county. 

Provenance:
Etchings purchased 1973, photos and negatives purchased 1992 

References:
Hirst D. Milhollen, Old Virginia Court Houses (1942)—original limited edition portfolio held in LVA Special Collections 

  • C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
    C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
  • C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
    C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
  • C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
    C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection
  • C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection (LVA 09_0869_019)
    C1:068 H. D. Milhollen Virginia Courthouse Etching and Photograph Collection (LVA 09_0869_019)

Related resources and collections:
Carl Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History (2005)

… Read the rest

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Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier

Ephemera Collection, Print Collection

C1: 011
ca.1865
12 lithographic cards, 2 x 3 inches

C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier (LVA 11_1148_002)

C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier (LVA 11_1148_004)

The mild pastels of these lithographic novelty cards belie their content, which is uncharacteristically downbeat for Southern wartime images. They feature Dixie caricatures populating scenes of defeat and despair, such as a man in gray—who appears to be lonesome, cold, and hungry—reminiscing about the “good times” of 1861. Most of these “life scenes” are not historically specific. “A Flank Movement” visually puns military action, showing a hungry soldier armed with a stiletto stalking an oblivious pig. “Heroes Still,” apparently a post-War scene, or one anticipating the fruits of pursuing a lost cause, shows humbled white Southerners tilling their own fields. Other scenes include “In a Bad Place,” “First Winter,” “Homesick,” “In the Trenches,” “The Vidette,” “The Camp Darkey,” “Following Stonewall,” and a sea battle captioned “No. 290.” The cards were originally held together into a dainty, homemade fascicle, fashioned from sackcloth, which includes the handwritten title of the collection along with an almost indecipherable name written in pencil: “Hope Stewart.” 

Provenance:
Donated, 1951

References:
Six of the images were reproduced in Cavalcade (winter, 1951).

  • C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier
    C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier
  • C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier
    C1: 011 Life Scenes of a Confederate Soldier
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Dugald Stewart Walker Bookplate Collection

Ephemera Collection, Print Collection

C1: 107
1920s–1930s
22 plates 

C1:107 Dugald Stewart Walker Bookplate Collection (LVA 10_1319_008)

Failed insurance salesman Dugald Stewart Walker (1883–1937), a native Richmonder and self-styled eccentric very much in artistic and cultural sympathy with the British aesthetes of a generation before, studied drawing at the University of Virginia and the New York School of Art, and was by the late 1920s internationally renowned as both a fine artist and popular illustrator of children’s books. While his gallery work was praised in the museums of London, Paris, and Rome, Walker’s elegant grotesqueries fared poorly back home in Depression-era Richmond—though he was keenly sought after as a bookplate designer by the Richmond and New York elite.                                                                        

With striking black-and-white prints reminiscent of the work of Aubrey Beardsley but distinctly his own, Walker created a whimsical, slightly sinister, and technically precise “Once Upon a Time” world of pleasure gardens, peacocks, satyrs, clowns, archers, and mounted knights. Often in his bookplates the highly personalized iconography of client preference is brought to bear on quaint themes and high modernist design. In the plate for the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, for example, delicately rendered chemistry beakers positioned above a “window” become, in their self-mirroring symmetry, a kind of ornamental pediment. In another plate, otherwise naturalistic boxers, poised for battle, become pilaster-like ornaments on either side of a monumental baroque doorway through which lovers can be glimpsed embracing in a … Read the rest

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O. L. Schwencke Cigar Box Label Collection

Ephemera Collection, Print Collection

C1: 004
ca. 1890
74 chromolithographs in original bound volume, 6.5 x 10 inches

C1:104 O. L. Schwencke Cigar Box Label Collection (LVA 11_0696_009)

With the extraordinary popularity of cigars in late-nineteenth century America, and the consequent birth of the cigar-box-label salesman, came colorful catalogs and sample books, of which ours is an intact example, “showcasing” the variety of label designs available to cigar manufacturers and merchants. By the early 1880s most label production had shifted from small towns to large specialty printing firms on the east coast, among these the Manhattan-based O. L. Schwencke, begun in 1884 and absorbed by Moehle Lithographic Co. in 1900. Done in luxurious chromolithography, the embossed labels in our Schwencke sample book contrast scenes of leisure, privilege, and high sophistication, such as operagoing and pleasure-boating, with a dizzying array of images to appeal to all manner of disposition and fantasy: sentimental courtships and family tableaux, patriotic allegories, scenes of foreign travel, sportsmanship, war, adventure, and industry, elaborate and indecipherable insignia, exotic animals and cherubs, caricatures of Arabs and Native Americans, mildly sexualized women, and American playboys and tycoons. These scenes usually appear under very broad legends such as “Leader,” “Beauty,” and “Peerless,” with more specific-sounding legends such as “Santiago,” “La Rosa Especial,” and “La Amenidad” posing as exotic brand names but in fact easily mapped over whatever generic cigar the merchant or manufacturer might have had on hand or … Read the rest

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