2023 Jane Ramsay Pomeroy Lecture with Ron Tyler
Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 7:00 pm ET
Approximately 60 minutes. This hybrid program will be held in person at Antiquarian Hall and livestreamed to a virtual audience on YouTube. Advance registration is required for both. Doors open at 6:30pm.
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The Jane Ramsay Pomeroy Lecture is a talk on printing and printmaking, supported by a gift from Robert W. Pomeroy, III in memory of his wife. Jane Pomeroy was an independent scholar and printer whose scholarship on Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), the first engraver on wood in America, included a bibliography of his engravings.
Join us as scholar Ron Tyler discusses his latest publication Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from railroads to telegraphy. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas. Although lithographic establishments thrived in Galveston, Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Dallas in post-Civil War Texas, they were ultimately cut short by the development of halftone engraving and the 1900 Galveston hurricane, still one of the deadliest natural disasters to strike the United States.
In Texas Lithographs, Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d’Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico; or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a developing Euro-American empire; the images collected envision an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans’ sense of self and to the world’s sense of Texas.
Ron Tyler is the retired director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. He also served as professor of history and director of the Texas State Historical Association at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of numerous books, including Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays, (ed.) The Art of Texas: 250 Years, Prints of the West, Audubon’s Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of the Birds of America, and Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist as Explorer.
