Picture sheet
Images sheet , the sheet material (lithographic printing) of 18/19. Century, which were mostly hand-colored. They were widespread as popular image and later reading material. The sheets, printed on cheap paper, were intended to instruct as well as to occupy and entertain. Predecessors were the single-leaf woodcuts of the 15th and 16th centuries and illustrated leaflets . All over Europe, over 300 printing houses produced picture sheets; The companies in Épinal (France) and Germany (Neuruppin, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Munich, etc.), but also in Moscow , were outstanding . Today, many of these picture sheets are seldom found as coveted collectibles even at auctions , but they are very popular with buyers at flea markets. In their heyday they were usually thrown away after viewing and reading, others were cut up in order to use individual motifs depicted on them. Still others adorned the parlor, lacking the possibility of acquiring art, or they were also used for teaching (picture ABC, ink sheets, fairy tales, morals). Although the sheets often achieved large print runs, relatively few of the individual editions have survived today. But you can find them in museums.
Scheme of the pictures
An attempt to capture the structure of picture sheets schematically comes to the following result: picture sheets contain a single picture or a sequence of two or more pictures. The images can either be combined as a contrast (good / bad, before / after) or as a derivative (arranged in rows). Most of the sheets can be divided into closed rows (the number of images is fixed, e.g. by the letters of the alphabet ) or open rows (the topics are particularly extensive and can only be represented in parts in the limited space).
Different locations
Photo sheets could be successfully produced where certain requirements were met. The local printing industry should be well developed. The shortest possible transport routes to efficient paper manufacturers were needed . It was useful to work in an established trading center. After all, the person of the entrepreneur was of great importance. According to these criteria, two main areas for the production of picture sheets developed in Central Europe .
Important places of publication were Épinal in the French Vosges (the Imagerie d'Épinal , founded in 1796, still produces current sheets today - 2015 -) as well as Weißenburg in Alsace and several cities in the neighboring southern German area: initially Nuremberg (where Friedrich-Campe -Verlag founded), later also in Munich , Augsburg and Stuttgart . The small town of Neuruppin in Brandenburg , around 70 km northwest of Berlin, is considered the capital of the European arc of images . It is also treated here as an example for other locations.
Neuruppiner picture sheet
The founder of the local tradition is the printer Johann Bernhard Kühn , who lived in Neuruppin from 1750 to 1826. His first picture sheets, printed from woodcuts , were created before 1800. His son Gustav Kühn (1794–1868), an intelligent and talented young man, completed specialist training in woodcut, steel and copper engraving in Berlin in 1812/1813 . In 1819 he joined his father's company as a partner and ran it from 1822 for almost 40 years. Kühn acted commercially skillfully and had a reliable feel for motifs currently in demand. He drew many of his pictures himself and provided them with his own texts and poems - always loyal to the king and as an advocate of order and morality. As early as 1825 he bought a lithography press and was able to significantly increase his production - the new technology was hardly widespread at the time. The publishing house existed for around 120 years. In 1939, for the 700th anniversary of the city of Neuruppin, Kühn's last picture sheet appeared with the motif number 10.337. The editions were different. 40,000 prints were not uncommon, individual sheets from the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 are even said to have been printed in two million copies.
On the edge of the sheets it read: Neu-Ruppin, available from Gustav Kühn . With this catchy slogan the company became a synonym for picture arches in large parts of Germany and Northern Europe. Other manufacturers soon settled in Neuruppin. In 1835, the lithography company Oehmigke & Riemschneider began producing picture sheets, a company that worked quite successfully and existed for a similarly long time - it wasn't until the 1930s that the last picture sheet appeared here with the number 10.545. Between 1855 and 1863, the F. W. Bergemann company in Neuruppin also produced around 1450 picture sheet motifs. However, neither of the two companies achieved the level of awareness of Gustav Kühn.
Theodor Fontane writes:
“What is the fame of the Times against the civiliſatoriſche task of the“ Ruppiner Bilderbog ”? (...) You are the thin thread through which long stretches of our own homeland, Lithuanian villages and maſuriſche huts and hamlets are connected with the world outside. "
The picture sheet passage in Neuruppin with an exhibition of several motifs is now located in the former printing house.
Common features
The products of all manufacturers of picture sheets, not only in Neuruppin, had a number of similarities. Their motifs did not differ fundamentally, apart from a few regional features. They also turned to the same customers. Picture sheets were popular and widespread mainly among the rural population and less educated city dwellers. The pictures were big and clear, the text short and simple, so it was easy to understand what it was about. The production was cheap: monochrome lithographs were printed in large numbers on plain paper and colored with the help of stencils in the publishing houses' painting rooms by poorly paid women and children . The sheets were not costly to distribute either. Usually they were sold by traveling people - hawkers or rag collectors - for a few pfennigs or shown at fairs .
Sheets of pictures served every imaginable interest of the general public - as long as it did not violate the raison d'être or valid moral standards. You bought pictures of saints , house blessings and sayings , portraits of rulers and their families, images of unreachable distant landscapes, play and cut-out sheets for children, and above all picture reports of current events: wars, weddings and funerals of celebrities, natural disasters ... In this sense, one can See picture sheets as the forerunners of today's illustrated newspapers.
Special motifs
Language of flowers. There were particularly numerous depictions of flowers. It was not about artistic expression or botanical accuracy, but about widespread associations - the rose smells seductive, a forget-me-not is supposed to keep memories alive, cacti or thistles express disappointment. In other cases the flowers illustrate moral, edifying or romantic sayings without any recognizable connection between text and image. The texts are of a simple sentimentality and linguistic simplicity, as they still appear in poetry albums today. Here are some examples: "As the sky is clear and pure / our love should also be". “The clover is a nice feed / for horse and cow, for sheep and deer”. "The fire lily flecks you / your nose if you hold it to it". "Here is my heart / it's not a joke".
City and landscape views, the so-called vedute . The heyday of these paintings began around the middle of the 19th century. The citizens' desire to travel grew, encouraged by the expansion of the railway network. Increasingly, German landscapes - Harz , Thuringia , Rhineland - with their castles and natural monuments were discovered as travel destinations. Most of the buyers of picture sheets did not have the time or money for longer trips, but the colorful sheets allowed them to participate in the general interest a little. Illustrations in travel guides and illustrated newspapers were often used as templates. In constant repetition, they were modified to such an extent that the truthfulness was often damaged - not a serious disadvantage because what was depicted was just as foreign to the buyer as it was to the draftsman. Sometimes current events provided the occasion for new motifs. The demand for views from Great Britain, for example, skyrocketed when the Prussian Prince Friedrich Wilhelm married the British Princess Victoria in 1858 .
Educational picture sheet. In Prussia, schooling had been compulsory on paper since 1736 ; it was not generally implemented until the 1880s. Up until then, teaching was incomplete and inadequate, especially in rural areas, and was often given makeshift by craftsmen or discharged soldiers. The task of the easy-to-understand picture sheets was to provide entertainment and edification as well as a minimum of intellectual training, a cheap encyclopedia for everyone from individual sheets. In 1874, the “Short dictionary for the German elementary school teacher ” wrote about the picture sheets: “Many of them can also be used as excellent and cheap means of illustration in school (...)”. Quite popular pedagogical motifs, varied in many ways, were the “pictorial representation of various verbs ” and “pictures according to the ABC ”.
Peep box pictures. A large number of the picture sheets were intended to be shown by the peep box man for a small fee at fairs and similar events (but could also be used in the usual way). These sheets were characterized by the captions in mirror writing . The demonstrator was by no means free in the choice of his material. Censorship requirements of 1818 for a peep-box man, for example, stipulated that he “must not lead any offensive, immoral, superstitious ideas, but only landscapes, excellent buildings, palaces, promenades, animals drawn from nature”.
A further development are the paper theaters , which were initially printed in one color and had to be colored by hand.
See also
literature
- Auringer, Julian: The sequential picture sheet of the 19th century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover 2019, https://doi.org/10.15488/4894 (also: dissertation)
- Stefan Brakensiek, Irina Rockel (eds.): Everyday life, gossip and world events. Neuruppiner picture sheet. A mass medium of the 19th century. Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 1993, ISBN 3-927085-82-0 .
- Elke Hilscher: The picture sheets in the 19th century (= studies on journalism. Bremer series, German press research. Vol. 22). Verlag Documentation Saur, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-7940-4522-X (also: Münster, Universität, Dissertation, 1975).
- Theodor Kohlmann : Neuruppiner Bilderbogen (= writings of the Museum for German Folklore, Berlin. Vol. 7). Museum für Deutsche Volkskunde et al., Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-88609-053-1 .
- Lisa Riedel: On the history of the Neuruppiner picture arches. With an essay "Gustav Kühn" by Theodor Fontane . 2nd Edition. Local history museum Neuruppin, Neuruppin 1985.
- Lisa Riedel, Werner Hirte (ed.): The new flower garden. City and country on Neuruppiner picture sheet. Eulenspiegel-Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-359-00270-9 .
- Karl Riha : picture sheet, picture story, picture novel. On different forms of “storytelling” in pictures. In: Wolfgang Haubrichs (Ed.): Erzählforschung. Theories, models and methods of narratives (= journal for literary studies and linguistics. Supplement 8). Volume 3. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1978, ISBN 3-525-21009-4 , pp. 176-192.
- Irina Rockel: Available from Gustav Kühn. On the history of the Neuruppiner Bilderbogen. Art & Image, Berlin 1992.
- Claudia Held: Family happiness on picture sheets: The bourgeois family of the 19th century in the mirror of Neuruppiner printmaking. Bonn 1992.
- Jan Schlürmann : The ideologization of war and the nation state. The German-Danish war in the mirror of the Neuruppiner picture sheets by Gustav Kühn (1848–1850). In: Christer Petersen (ed.): Signs of war in literature, film and the media. Volume 2: Stephan Jaeger, Christer Petersen (Ed.): Ideologisierung and Deideologisierung. Ludwig, Kiel 2006, ISBN 3-937719-00-8 , pp. 192-215.
- Gertraud Zaepernick : Neuruppiner picture sheets from the Gustav Kühn company. Seemann, Leipzig 1972.
- German Historical Museum (Ed.): Greed for new pictures. Flyer, picture sheet, comic strip. (Exhibition catalog) Theiss Verlag, Darmstadt 2017, ISBN 978-3-8062-3638-5 .
Web links
- Art-historical picture sheets at arthistoricum.net - the context of the history of science and digitized works in the themed portal "History of Art History"
- War picture sheet - digital
- Bilderbogenforschung.de - Online encyclopedia and research portal for the sequential illustrated arch of the 19th century.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katharina Siefert: Saints, rulers, jumping jacks. Picture sheet from Weißenburg. = Saints, souverains, pantins (= folklore publications of the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe. Vol. 5). Thorbecke, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-7995-0306-4 (exhibition catalog: Karlsruhe, Badisches Landesmuseum, June 12, 1999 - September 26, 1999; Wissembourg, Grange aux Dîmes, June 11, 1999 - August 29, 1999).
- ↑ See the presentation of various picture sheets by Gustav Kühn on gustav-kuehn.de ( Memento of the original from September 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ quoted from Deutsches Textarchiv
