Flowers and Vegetables (1800s): Art, History and Details

Flowers and Vegetables (1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Anton Carl Rahn (American, born Germany, 1842–1907).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This lithograph served as an advertisement for the seeds sold at James Vick in Rochester, New York, a leading American nursery center in the latter half of the 19th century. An auxiliary business, the production of fruit and flower prints aided nurserymen and their travelling salesmen. At first the lithographs were hand colored, but in 1871 a local company began to print in color. Lithographs are made by drawing a design onto a stone with a greasy crayon; water adheres to the bare stone while the printing ink sticks to the greasy areas. The process was invented at the end of the 18th century and was often used after about 1820 because it is a speedy and inexpensive medium, producing more impressions compared to other tonal techniques such as mezzotint, aquatint, and stipple.

Object facts

• Title: Flowers and Vegetables
• Date: 1800s
• Creator attribution: Anton Carl Rahn (American, born Germany, 1842–1907)
• Culture: America
• Type: Print
• Technique: Color lithograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 51.8 x 39.5 cm (20 3/8 x 15 9/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1944.14

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland, for the Donald Gray Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of an exhibition of the art of lithography: commemorating the sesquicentennial of its invention, 1798-1948. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, November 11, 1948-January 2, 1949.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.