print room: Rex Brasher We got these Brasher prints as part of a large auction lot. There was no provenance or other information included, and the origin and nature of the prints was unclear. Examination under a loupe showed two types of prints -- collotypes and offset lithographs. Some of each type were hand-signed with the name Rex Brasher. All prints were hand-colored in a manner consistent with airbrush and stencil, which is how Brasher colored his prints. Occasionally, we found places were paint was applied with a conventional brush rather than an airbrush (e.g., the red tips on the wings of the Cedar Waxwing). This is also consistent with how Brasher worked. The Brasher signatures matched other examples of his signature that we found, and were done with ink or pencil. Because there is relatively little information available available on Brasher's work -- and some of it is conflicting -- we went to the Library of Congress to examine their set of the original limited edition of The Birds and Trees of North America. Due to condition issues with the binding, we limited our examination to Volumes 10 and 12. All prints had at least one number in the image, sometimes more. The numbers do not designate a plate number per se, but are the American Ornithologists' Union's (AOU's) number for the species and/or subspecies. For example, the plate of the wrentit below shows two numbers, 747b and 747c. Each number designates a specific subspecies of the wrentit. In the case of the wrentit species, there are additional plates showing other subspecies. Although the complete set includes 875 plates, the AOU numbering system only goes into the 700s. Some species have multiple plates devoted to them, e.g., the winter wren (in order to include the many subspecies of these birds). Less often, some species (e.g., the blue jay) were portrayed in more than one plate, not to show subspecies but to show additional views of the bird. None of the prints we examined in the volumes were hand-signed. Volume 10 was signed on the cover page by Brasher, but Volume 12 was not. The signature in the book was very similar to the signatures on our signed plates. Both volumes had printed on the title page: Done in Chickadee Valley near Kent CT in the Year 1930. In the bottom left corner of Volume 10, there was this: Edition limited to 500 copies of which this is No. 113. The number "113" was written in pencil whereas the rest of the statement was printed. Volume 12 has the same statement, but there was nothing written in the blank space for the number for the set. Also, the title page of Volume 12 was not signed. We can only hypothesize about the discrepancy in the number of the set we examined and the commonly accepted idea that this set was issued in a limited edition of 100 copies only. Our hypothesis would be that Brasher issued 100 sets to begin with, had some (or perhaps much) material left over at the end of the project, and eventually issued some additional sets. Our best guess is that Brasher had made enough prints for many more sets (500?), but was only able to sell a few more due to difficult economic times in the 1930s. Over the years, he (or possibly assistants acting under his supervision) colored, and then eventually sold (or otherwise distributed) the prints individually or in smaller sets. Most likely, the prints were all made at once in the thirties. We speculate that Brasher ran short on funds, and therefore used offset lithography for the last 100-150 prints in the set. These prints were hand-colored in the same way as the collotypes (using stencil and airbrush). Although easily distinguishable from the collotypes under magnification, they struck us as being of about the same quality as the collotypes. To summarize what we found, every plate we examined was hand-colored in a manner consistent with airbrush and stencil. All the prints in Volume 10 that we examined under a loupe were collotypes, while all the plates in Volume 12 that we examined turned out to be offset lithographs. This is consistent with the prints we are offering -- the offset prints are all higher numbered species, and all but one of them is from Volume 12 (with the exception being from Volume 11). There were three differences between the prints we have and the ones shown in the original 1930s set. First, some of our prints are hand-signed while none of the prints in the limited edition set were hand-signed. Second, on occasion the background colors in a few of our prints are different from those appearing in the book. For example, the Brown Creeper print (see below) has a green background, whereas the Brown Creeper in the volume had a blue background. We can draw no conclusions about why this is so, except to note that it is common to find some variation among individual prints of a series whenever hand-coloring is involved. Finally, there is the question of the binding. The books were not bound in a conventional manner. Attached to each print was a piece of material (which looked like linen) that had several holes in it -- the binding went through these holes, so that the actual prints were untouched except by the adhesive that attached the material to the print. Only two of our prints have this material attached. We would guess that these two prints come from disbound sets of Brasher's work. The rest, we would guess, are original prints that Brasher sold individually or as part of small sets. There is no reason to think the binding edge was trimmed away -- these are original prints made in exactly the same way as the bound prints, but these were almost certainly never bound.
Last updated 02.28.09 |
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