PICTURE STUDY
Old Master Reproductions and the Picture Study Movement in Kansas
Reproductions played an important role in art collecting by Kansas schools. From the 1870s through the late 1920s, copies of artworks by figures such as Jean-François Millet, Rosa Bonheur, and George Inness were an integral part of school enhancement and teaching.
Described initially as “Picture Decoration,” the movement began to be referred to in the 1890s as “Picture Study,” or “art appreciation,” to highlight its emphasis on integrating art into curriculums. Historic Western art by the European “Old Masters” dominated acquisitions, with a handful of American figures, such as landscape painter Inness, recommended to teachers by education theorists.
Kansas was particularly influenced by Picture Study. Publishing houses persuaded numerous schools, from Meade in the southwest to Marysville in the northeast, to stage “picture” exhibitions and use entrance fees to acquire reproductions for classrooms. The Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs also purchased reproductions that circulated as exhibitions in schools.
Bonheur’s The Horse Fair teems with energy. The animals for sale move along Paris’s tree-lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital amid groomers, dealers, and prospective buyers. The artist spent more than a year sketching at the Parisian horse market, dressing as a man to discourage attention. Her first painting of the scene drew wide acclaim when it appeared at the Paris Salon of 1853.
Reproductions of Bonheur’s market scene were especially popular among schools. Education specialist Ida Harris, writing in 1899 for The Perry Magazine, noted, “[W]hy place before the children a common chromo card to illustrate animal life, when we can have access to reproductions from such masters as …. Bonheur … for the study of horses.”
Frameable renditions of The Horse Fair came into schools in Kansas communities such as Fredonia, Holton, and Anthony, as purchases, class gifts, and, in one case, a spelling bee prize. These examples from McPherson and WaKeeney’s former Valley School, a one-room schoolhouse, demonstrate the range of adaptations of Bonheur’s dynamic image.
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1852-55, oil on canvas, 96 ¼ x 199 ½ in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887, 87.25
After Rosa Bonheur
Born 1822, Bordeaux, France
Died 1899, Thomery, France
The Horse Fair, 1852–55
Lithograph of painting after original oil on canvas, ca. 1935
18 7/8 x 22 5/8 in. (frame)
Trego County Historical Society Museum, WaKeeney, Kansas
After Rosa Bonheur
Born 1822, Bordeaux, France
Died 1899, Thomery, France
The Horse Fair, 1852–55
Photogravure of engraving after original oil on canvas, ca. 1910
19 3/4 x 33 5/8 in. (frame)
McPherson USD 418, on loan to McPherson Museum
Simon Glücklich
Born 1863, Bielsko-Biala, Silesia, Poland
Died 1943, Munich, Germany
Evening Song (Spring Melody) (Boy with Recorder), 19th century
Art publisher, Ludwig Möller, Lubeck, Germany, 1920s
Photogravure of original oil on canvas
24 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. (frame)
Winfield Public Schools, USD 465 Foundation
Simon Glücklich
Born 1863, Bielsko-Biala, Silesia, Poland
Died 1943, Munich, Germany
Spring Song, 19th century
Art publisher, Ludwig Möller, Lubeck, Germany, 1920s
Photogravure of original oil on canvas
24 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. (frame)
Labette Community College, Parsons
The Copley Prints
1915 sales catalogue
Curtis & Cameron, Boston, publisher
Kansas State University, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, library collection
The Copley Prints
1911 sales catalogue
Curtis & Cameron, Boston, publisher
Private collection, promised gift to McPherson USD 41
While the McPherson school district emphasized original artworks in its annual exhibitions, the first in 1911 comprised mainly reproductions referred to as The Copley Prints, circulated by Boston-based publisher Curtis & Cameron. One “picture” on display included Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which had been stolen from the Louvre a few months earlier.
Gilt Edge School Series Composition Book
John Newton, 3rd Grade
Lawn Ridge Elementary School, Whiting, 1928-1929
Private collection
John Newton’s grade school notebook is filled with assignments to write about paintings by American and European artists. This pasted-on image may have been cut from a sales catalogue like that issued by Curtis & Cameron, or it may be a “penny picture” sold through The Perry Magazine.
In a 1914 report for the U.S. Office of Education, Royal Bailey Farnum remarked on the attractiveness of “penny prints” to children like Newton. He noted the pictures’ low cost as a particular benefit to American schools:
Small pictures are much more easily handled, and they may be mounted and preserved with written work in the form of a school booklet. Furthermore, the expense of obtaining wall sizes of the total number of pictures usually studied would eliminate such a procedure in the average school.
Poor copyright laws in the nineteenth century allowed Holmes’s painting to be reproduced and circulated widely in the United States and Britain. The image’s embrace appears to have reflected the way in which pets and children began to be seen in the late nineteenth century as sentimental beings rather than economic assets.
The title of Holmes’s charming domestic scene may refer to arguments made by the era’s animal welfarists that, because they could not talk, children and animals were helpless and in need of protection. Holmes shows child and dog (and cat) in similar positions—all four limbs on the ground—reinforcing the idea of their shared vulnerability.
The June 1878 issue of Our Dumb Animals, a monthly magazine published by the Massachusetts Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) featured Holmes’s image. Humane groups like the MSPCA frequently appealed to children for help with their anti-cruelty campaigns. In schools, students created posters for Be Kind to Animals Week and read age-appropriate books focused on animal advocacy. Groups believed that children who were taught how to be kind to animals would grow up to be empathetic adults.
After George Augustus Holmes
Born ca. 1828, London, England
Died 1911, London, England
Can’t You Talk?, 1875
Photogravure of engraving after original oil on canvas
19 7/8 x 24 in. (frame)
Labette Community College, Parsons
