Description
Before the color photograph changed everything, a Swiss company found a way to bring the soaring mountain ranges, sun-drenched coastlines, thundering waterfalls, teeming cities and vast open landscapes of the United States to vivid life. The Photochrom process, developed by the Photoglob Company of Zurich in the 1880s, used hand-drawn lithographic plates derived from black-and-white photographs to produce richly colored prints of remarkable warmth and detail, each image built up from as many as fifteen separate color layers by skilled craftsmen. The results captivated Victorian and Edwardian audiences who collected them as windows onto a world most would never see firsthand.
The United States received one of the most geographically diverse treatments in the entire Photochrom catalog, and with 465 prints this collection offers a sweeping portrait of a young nation coming into its own with breathtaking confidence. California dominates with good reason — the golden light of Yosemite’s granite walls, the mission architecture of the coast, the orange groves of the south and the fog-draped hills of San Francisco proved irresistible to the Photochrom lens. New York contributes the teeming energy of Manhattan’s nascent skyline, the grandeur of Niagara Falls and the elegant promenades of the Hudson Valley. Colorado delivers some of the most dramatic imagery in the entire collection — the jagged peaks of the Rockies, the Royal Gorge, mountain towns perched at impossible elevations and alpine meadows of startling beauty. Florida rounds out the major contributors with its tropical harbors, Spanish-influenced architecture, palm-lined shores and the languid romance of a southern frontier still finding its identity. Scattered throughout are glimpses of a handful of other states — enough to suggest the full breadth of a continental nation stretching from sea to sea.
Vivid in color and extraordinary in their geographic range, these 465 prints capture the United States at a pivotal moment — industrializing rapidly yet still wild at its edges, modern in its ambitions yet ancient in its landscapes. Now available as high-quality fine art prints, they bring the golden age of Victorian and Edwardian America to your walls.
See the full collection: Vintage Photochrom United States
