Artist Collections

Artist collections at the American Antiquarian Society include drawings, watercolors, sketches, prints, proofs, and photographs by a range of American artists. These collections are often formed from the personal archives of painters and printmakers. Photography collections include both prints and negatives. Nineteenth-century printmaking firms such as Louis Prang & Company and H.W. Dubois & Co. are also represented.

	Alexander Anderson Collection The American Antiquarian Society holds thousands of examples of wood engraved illustrations and hundreds of engraved boxwood blocks created by Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), whose work appears inside almanacs, Bibles, medical texts, periodicals, and children’s books and also on broadsides and ephemera.
	Cross Family Collection Box List The inventory listed in this site consists of 29 boxes and 8 oversized folders of material dating from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries with the bulk of the collection falling between 1870 and 1890. The collection in the Graphic Arts department has over 466 items, many either created, featuring, or owned by one of the three Cross family siblings: Emma Augusta Cross (1850-1933), Henry Clay Cross (1852-1913) and Joel Foster Cross (1846-1925). In addition to pencil sketches, watercolors, oils, pen and inks, there are also boxwood blocks, engraved proofs, photographs, and manuscript material.
	David Claypoole Johnston Family Illustrated Box List The David Claypoole Johnston Family Illustrated Box List describes of 28 boxes of material dating from 1799 through the early twentieth century, and spans two generations. David Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865) is a noted cartoonist and humorist, who also worked in watercolor, charcoal and oil. The collection at the American Antiquarian Society consists of approximately 50 watercolors, two states of three of his most famous cartoons (including colored proofs, engravings and watercolors), pencil, pen, ink and wash drawings, working pieces, envelopes for Metamorphosis, and a full run of his career-launching publication Scraps.
	Farber Gravestone Collection In the the late twentieth century, Worcester area residents Daniel Farber (1906-1998) and Jessie Lie Farber (1920-2013) photographed thousands of early American gravestones. The collection is strong for central and southern New England, with scattered coverage for gravestones in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and elsewhere.
	George Dubois Family Collection The George Dubois Family Collection of just over 1,000 objects was acquired by the American Antiquarian Society in 1998. It contains a visual record of the work of the lithographic printmaker George Dubois (c.1810-1888) and his descendants. George was born in France and, after serving as an artist in the military there, went to Germany to learn lithography. In 1849, at the age of 39, he immigrated with his wife and children to the United States and worked briefly in Philadelphia, before settling in the Boston area.
	Louis Maurer Collection The American Antiquarian Society holds a small archive of original works of art by the artist Louis Maurer (1832-1932). Maurer worked in New York City as a lithographer for over thirty years, creating prints for firms such as Currier & Ives and Major & Knapp.The Louis Maurer Collection at the Society includes 95 original drawings, watercolors, and oil sketches, a collection of 38 lithographic proofs, and a small wooden box housing Maurer's lithographic tools.
	Louis Prang and Chromolithography This online exhibition showcases the Society's collection of the work of Louis Prang (1824-1909) and his Boston lithograph firm Louis Prang & Company. Featuring prints, salesman's samples and progressive proof books, this exhibition tells the story of Prang during the height of his career in chromolithography during the second half of the nineteenth century. Prang pioneered developments in the chromolithographic process, creating painting-like prints for the general public.
	Paul Revere Collection Inventory While Paul Revere (1735-1818) is most famously known for his legendary midnight ride as well as his three-dimensional wares, his prints and works on paper remain some of the most iconic images of the late eighteenth-century. This online inventory celebrates the extensive Revere collection of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), including items within eight boxes in the Graphic Arts collection
	Photographs of 17th and 18th Century Structures in Massachusetts Collection Inventory From 1887 to 1945, Harriette Merrifield Forbes (1856-1951) photographed seventeenth and eighteenth century structures throughout central and eastern Massachusetts. Her images, preserved as 853 negatives (mostly glass plate negatives), have been digitized and cataloged as part of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
	Photographs of the New England Fair by B.T. Hill Collection: An Illustrated Inventory The American Antiquarian Society contains a collection of glass plate negatives taken by Benjamin Thomas Hill (1863-1927), at the Worcester County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds in the early decades of the twentieth century.
	Theodor Clemens Wohlbrück Photographs The American Antiquarian Society collection includes several hundred glass plate negatives from Theodor Clemens Wohlbrück's (1879-1936) studio in Worcester, Massachusetts. In addition to the glass plate negatives, the Society also holds a group of over one thousand printed proof photographs (both albumen and silver oxide prints) which includes images of forty-one different towns in Worcester County.