Books about antiques.

This deeply informative and lavishly illustrated book offers an unusual breadth of perspective on the history of prints and related media associated with New Orleans and Louisiana. Drawing on an impressive array of primary materials and consistently rendering balanced judgments, the fourteen essays in the book were first presented at the 1987 meeting of the North American Print Conference. The editor is Jessie J. Poesch, distinguished professor emeritus of art history at Tulane University in New Orleans, who also contributed the introductory essay.

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From its founding in the early seventeenth century to the present, New Orleans has been a city of legend. Its location at the entry to North America's largest river shaped its economic, social, cultural, artistic, and demographic character for nearly three hundred years. Throughout that time its diverse ethnic groups have had to confront an array of seemingly impossible environmental challenges, but in always meeting them, they created a place with a history and culture unlike any other in North America. At a time when all this is threatened, a book like Printmaking in New Orleans reminds us of how much has already been lost.

As the title indicates, the essays illuminate the history of the city and region through the art and craft of the print. In "Publicizing a Vast New Land," Gay M. Gomez discusses the earliest European artists to picture Louisiana, their depictions shaped in part by the power of imagination and in part by the needs of commerce. Their maps and views, made to accompany the literary accounts of travelers and explorers, were intended as visual propaganda to stimulate curiosity and promote the new land, its native inhabitants, flora, and fauna.

In "Walking the Streets of New Orleans," John A. Mare II chronicles the city's growth through maps. The French engineers who laid out New Orleans in 1721 established a basic grid in the classic military tradition, with Central Square facing the river that was so significant to the city's development. Many of the earliest maps include images of sailing vessels and small boats; by the nineteenth century steamboats had become the primary focus of attention.

When the first printing press arrived in New Orleans in 1764, its output was confined to government documents, as Florence M. Jumonville points out in "Early Printing in New Orleans." Not until after the Louisiana Purchase did presses begin to flourish, and not until the mid-1830s did documents printed in New Orleans regularly contain illustrations. John Magill's "A Pelicans-Eye View" traces the city's expansion through engravings, lithographs, and photographs taken from on high. Artists through the centuries have used bird's-eye views to create superbly detailed images that permit us to study the urban environment in ways that no other visual medium or written account allows. As is typical, those views of New Orleans also allow us to see how artists sometimes distorted and manipulated images to emphasize aspects of the cityscape they consider most important.

In "Pre-Civil War Lithography in New Orleans," Priscilla Lawrence surveys notable antebellum lithographs along with ...