Nurserymen's Sample Book. by MITCHELL, W.T. and Son

Rochester, N.Y., Rochester Litho. Co., D.M. Dewey, Vredenburg &c & Co., M. Brunswick & Co., Stecher Lith Co., [ca 1900-1910]. Oblong 8vo., (5 4/8 x 8 4/8 inches). 86 fine chromolithographed plates and 29 half-tones with additional colour, of varieties of fruit including apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries, and even dewberries, trees, shrubs and flowering plants. Contemporary black cloth. Provenance: with the ink stamp of W.T. Mitchell and Son, Nurserymen of Beverly in Ohio on the endpapers, and their ink stamps with pricing information on some plates throughout. A fine album of extraordinarily colourful plates of plants of all varieties available from the Mitchells of Ohio, printed by a variety of printers local to Rochester in New York. Each plate is accompanied by a short caption describing the plant: this of the Wragg cherry "Origin somewhat uncertain: supposed to be Russian. Tree very hardy, enduring extreme cold, and succeeding generally. Quality fine." "As Rochester's gardening flourished a local bookseller with an interest in the subject, D.M. Dewey, began to collect and publish coloured plates of fruit, flowers, shrubs, and fruit-bearing or purely ornamental trees. Selections of these plates sold by Dewey and others from the 1850s to the last decade of the century were usually bound into pocket-sized books about ten by six inches with stout leather covers, often stamped with the name of the nursery or the salesman offering the plants portrayed within. Dewey also recognised the wider appeal of the coloured plates described by Charles van Ravenswaay as 'an innovation in American popular art' ("A Nineteenth-Century Garden", 1977, page 20...). Their polychromic attractions were extended to a larger audience in small selections from a larger-sized series presented in decorative bindings, ... the earliest plates were simple watercolours, but later, as the demand grew, the technique of theorem paintings coloured with the help of stencils was used to multiply the number of copies as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Later still engraved or lithographed outlines were coloured by hand, and finally chromolithographs printed in colour began to replace more laborious procedures, though some of these were finished by hand too. Most of these processes involved the labour of teams of artists and colourists, one or two of whom went on to establish themselves as rivals to Dewey, though none achieved the same success" (Oak Spring Pomona 64). .