Nineteenth-century Philadelphia advertising prints

Lithographic advertisements depicting local storefronts and factories comprise the largest body of work visually documenting the commercial life of Philadelphia before the widespread use of photography. These lively images illustrate a wide range of trades while simultaneously preserving "in thousands of small but meaningful details the appearance and ways of the past." (1) Store owners commissioned views of their establishments that depicted the architecture, the signs adorning their buildings, displays of merchandise in the windows and on the sidewalks, and delivery wagons bearing the company's advertising. Artists desirous of producing a pleasing image added customers shopping, pedestrians strolling by, street vendors, carters, errand boys, dogs, and vehicles of every description, creating busy street scenes in the forground. Open doorways and large windows provide glimpses into the interiors, capturing clerks serving customers, shop counters, shelves of merchandise, and craftsmen at work.

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The print and photograph department at the Library Company of Philadelphia, which specializes in images depicting the city of Philadelphia and works by regional artists, contains hundreds of nineteenth-century images documenting Philadelphia's role as a leading American manufacturing city. The commercial imagery of the city before the Civil War consists primarily of pictorial advertisements (2) commissioned by local merchants and manufacturers to promote their businesses, services, and products.

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Changes in printing technology transformed the design and character of pictorial advertisements in the 1840s and 1850s. As lithographic firms were established in major East Coast cities, advertisers turned to this medium as cost effective and flexible. Views featuring commercial architecture, window displays, and the daily street life of Philadelphia captured the interest of the local antiquarian Charles Augustus Poulson (1789-1866), who collected many such views and bequeathed them to the Library Company, making it the largest public repository in the country of lithographic images of Philadelphia.

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The growth of the lithographic trade in Philadelphia coincided with a tremendous increase in population and the physical growth of the city in the mid-nineteenth century. As the commercial district expanded west toward the Schuylkill River, older residential and commercial structures of traditional brick were replaced by new retail and manufacturing buildings of granite, sandstone, and iron in increasingly ornate architectural styles. Merchants commissioned views of their buildings to publicize recent construction or changes in their location. New buildings, and the advertisements in which they were featured, attracted a growing number of middle-class consumers, particularly women, to Philadelphia's downtown.

Lithographs captured the character of the city's retail stores, which sold a wide variety of merchandise including clothing, hats, wines and liquors, hardware, fancy and dry goods, paper hangings, jewelry and watches, lamps, china and glassware, and soap and candles. Joseph Feinour's stove and metalwares store advertisement (Fig. 2) typifies storefront views in the collection. It incorporates detailed depictions of a variety of heating and cooking stoves lining the sidewalk, and kettles, pots, and pitchers in window displays. Employees are seen assisting customers in front of the store and at the counter inside. At the left a worker blacks a stove. The open doorways invite potential customers and show off the well-stocked shelves. The view also captures architectural details such as the transom windows, shutters, and the steep twisting interior stairway.

Small businessmen like Feinour often combined retail and manufacturing functions in one facility with a storefront at street level and workshops either behind or above it. As the size of manufacturing concerns in Philadelphia increased, factory complexes with multiple buildings and yards were constructed outside the crowded commercial district. Lithographers depicted factories producing drugs and chemicals, coaches, stoves, matches, biscuits, patent medicines, and perfume, as well as iron-, marble, and machine works. The manufacturers distributed these views to potential customers and wholesalers and retailers in the United States and abroad. An advertisement for Neall and Matthews, iron founders and machinists (Fig. 4), depicts the company's factory buildings, iron furnaces, and offices. Like other such images in the collection, the focus is on activity in the yard and shows workers finishing boilers and machine parts, and loading completed work onto wagons. The text below the image appears in Spanish, English, and French, indicating the extent of the firm's distribution network.

Precursors of the large lithographic views date to the seventeenth century, when European merchants turned to such printmaking processes as copperplate engraving for advertisements because they allowed far greater freedom of design than letterpress printing. Pictorial elements, decorative motifs, and text could be easily combined, and a variety of ornamental lettering was possible. Because printmaking techniques were flexible, the design of pictorial advertisements was responsive to changes in taste and often mirrored stylistic innovations in other areas of the decorative arts.