Image Crazy

“Pictures are all the go these days. There is a perfect rage for pictures.”

This remark by a North Carolina journalist in 1848 neatly distilled what many sensed was overtaking American life. In the decades before the Civil War, the nation experienced what contemporaries called an “illustration mania.” As Michael Leja shows in A Flood of Pictures, this was not merely a matter of quantity. It signaled a shift produced by new technologies and a widening popular culture that reshaped how Americans encountered art, absorbed information, and imagined their world.

At that time the institutions we now associate with the visual arts scarcely existed. Major museums appeared only after the war, so artworks circulated through makeshift venues—rented halls, temporary galleries, improvised exhibition spaces. With the spread of steamboats after 1807 and railroads after 1830, it became easier to transport even large and fragile works, turning exhibitions into public events. Rembrandt Peale’s Court of Death, a 269-square-foot painting that traveled from city to city as a kind of visual performance in the early 1820s, exemplified this new mobility. Though it was accompanied by a four-page pamphlet its enormous dimensions and somber allegory about life’s transience were designed to be experienced as much as interpreted.

Other works found even larger audiences. In the 1840s Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave—a marble figure of a bound woman rendered with a blend of classical restraint and antislavery fervor—drew crowds exceeding 100,000 as it made its way from Boston to New Orleans. Still greater was the enthusiasm for Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes, a huge South American landscape painting that toured the United States and Britain between 1859 and 1861 and was displayed in theatrical settings that framed it like a window onto another world.

While such exhibitions brought art before large audiences, their reach remained geographically limited. More consequential were the advances that made it possible to reproduce and distribute images widely. Leja emphasizes that the demands of an expanding popular culture in Jacksonian America motivated artists and printers to adopt every available technique for satisfying the public’s hunger for pictures. Lithography, developed in Germany in the 1790s, became increasingly important in the US during the antebellum period. By drawing on specially prepared limestone, artists could produce images that were easily printed on paper in multiple copies. Early lithographs were restricted to black and white, but the later development of chromolithography—achieved by printing from multiple stones, each carrying a different color—introduced vivid hues to the prints.

Lithography was crucial in transforming images into mass-produced goods. Pictures that once were limited to galleries or private collections now circulated widely, appearing in prints, scrapbooks, and affordable publications. Other techniques also contributed to this growing visual economy. Steel engraving, though labor intensive, produced images with exceptional clarity and durability, making it ideal for high-quality book illustrations. Copper engraving, long valued for its softness and convenience, remained in use but proved less durable, since plates wore down after many printings.

A more decisive breakthrough came with the refinement of wood engraving. Unlike traditional woodcuts, which were carved on the side grain of softer wood, wood engravings were cut into the hard end-grain of blocks—typically boxwood—using fine metal burins. This method allowed for much greater precision and detail. More important, whereas copper and steel engravings had to be printed separately from text, wood engravings could be locked into the same press as movable type. The result was a new kind of page on which words and images appeared together, reinforcing and amplifying each other. The introduction of electrotyping in 1838 was another advance, enabling printers to create durable metal copies of engraved blocks suitable for large print runs.

The impact of these developments was most immediately felt in the growing world of the penny press. Cheap newspapers, sold for a cent, targeted a wide and often newly literate audience. Their pages were filled with reports of crimes, disasters, scandals, and human curiosities—stories crafted to attract attention and evoke emotion. Illustrations became essential to this sensational journalism. Striking engravings turned stories into spectacles, providing visual representations of events that readers might otherwise have found hard to imagine.

One of the most famous examples was the so-called moon hoax of 1835. Published in the New York Sun, the series reported falsely that the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a lush lunar landscape inhabited by strange creatures. The author of the series, Richard Adams Locke, populated the moon with blue unicorns, bipedal beavers, and winged humanoids. Though entirely fictitious, his account was widely believed. Illustrators seized on its fantastical imagery, producing scenes of flying man-bats and exotic terrain that captivated the public imagination. Edgar Allan Poe later called the episode “decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation” ever produced in America or Europe.

While the moon hoax appealed to a sense of wonder, other illustrated stories catered to a more morbid curiosity. Fires, shipwrecks, and homicides became common topics in the illustrated press. Among the many reported in the penny papers, the murders of Helen Jewett and Samuel Adams drew particular attention. Jewett, a sex worker, was killed in 1836 by someone wielding a hatchet. Suspicion initially pointed to one of her clients, Richard P. Robinson, who was later acquitted. Newspapers offered sensational descriptions of the crime and its aftermath. James Gordon Bennett, writing in The New York Herald, highlighted the beauty of Jewett’s partially nude body: “the perfect figure—the exquisite limbs—the fine face—the full arms—the beautiful bust.” Some illustrators created images of Jewett with torn clothing and exposed flesh, while others dramatized the moment of attack, showing the murderer with the hatchet raised over his helpless victim.

The murder in 1841 of the printer Samuel Adams by the bookkeeper John C. Colt was the subject of a striking visual record. The killing stemmed from a debt dispute, during which Colt struck Adams with a hatchet. To hide the crime, Colt dismembered the body, salted it to mask the odor, packed it in a box, and shipped it to New Orleans. The plan failed when a ship’s crew detected the smell of decomposition. The case captivated the public, with engravings illustrating every part of the story. One, captioned “Samuel Adams, the printer, before he was cut up and salted,” showed the naked corpse of the victim. Others depicted the murder scene, the crate containing Adams’s body, and Colt on trial. These images did more than just show events; they shaped public perception, making the story unforgettable in a way words alone could not.

Meanwhile, visual culture thrived through more theatrical forms. P.T. Barnum’s exhibit of the Feejee Mermaid shows the connection between image, illusion, and spectacle. The creature itself—a monkey’s head stitched to the body of a fish—was less striking than the images used to advertise it. Posters and newspaper illustrations turned the grotesque specimen into a beautiful, bare-breasted woman in a scenic maritime setting. The exhibit’s success depended not on its authenticity but on the persuasive power of visual displays.

Leja’s scope extends beyond sensationalism to include more traditional images from domestic and religious life. One of the most ambitious publishing efforts of the time was Harper’s Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible, which contained more than 1,200 pages and about 1,600 illustrations, many of them large and highly detailed. Made using electrotyped wood engraving, they demonstrated a level of clarity and durability that set new standards for printed images. Some critics worried that too many pictures might diminish the text’s sacredness. Still, the book was extremely popular, selling tens of thousands of copies and demonstrating that illustrated volumes could attract a broad audience. Walt Whitman described it as “one of those really great productions…unequalled by the publishing of any other printers in this country or in Europe.”

The most significant advance in image creation during this period was the invention of photography. In the late 1830s the Parisian Louis Daguerre developed a process that captured images directly on silver-coated copper plates. The resulting daguerreotypes were praised for their remarkable detail. One observer remarked, “They cannot be called copies of nature, but portions of nature herself.” Photography quickly gained popularity in the 1840s, with studios opening in cities nationwide. However, daguerreotypes had a major limitation: each image was unique and couldn’t be easily reproduced.

To overcome this limitation, artists transformed photographs into engravings or lithographs, which made possible their printing and distribution. Mezzotint, a technique capable of capturing subtle details of light and shadow, proved especially effective in reproducing the tonal qualities of photographic images.

The German-born brothers Frederick and William Langenheim, working out of Philadelphia in the 1840s, emerge in Leja’s account as exemplary figures of a period that prized at once the singular masterpiece and the endlessly reproducible image. Frederick manned the camera, William managed the business, and together they were keenly attuned to technological innovation. Their early renown rested on the Niagara Falls daguerreotypes of 1845—unrepeatable five-plate feats of precision that they dispatched as tokens of American achievement to Queen Victoria and Daguerre. These panoramas were not merely technical marvels; they advertised the republic’s claim to visual authority at a moment when art, science, and national ambition flowed freely into one another.

Yet the Langenheims were already pressing against the limits of the unique image. By securing US rights to the calotype in 1849, they pivoted toward reproducibility, issuing salted paper prints of Niagara Falls and major cities meant to supplant lithographs. In the early 1850s they embraced the wet collodion process, whose smooth glass negatives replaced the calotype’s fibrous grain with a striking clarity of detail. Coated with a viscous, light-sensitive solution and exposed before it dried, the wet plate yielded negatives capable of producing unlimited sharp prints, which made possible the flood of cartes de visite and portrait photographs that soon saturated American daily life.

The brothers’ ambitions only widened. In 1857 they founded the American Stereoscopic Company, which manufactured and sold stereograph cards, the Victorian era’s 3D entertainment, consisting of twin photographs mounted side by side that, when viewed through a stereoscope, merged into a single image with startling depth and realism. Most striking of all were their hyalotypes, magic lantern slides projected for audiences as luminous, often narrated sequences. By lifting photography from the hand to the screen, the Langenheims helped propel it out of artisanal isolation and into the currents of mass visual culture, where image making became not just an art but a public experience.

Photographs couldn’t be printed together with text until the 1880s, when halftone made it possible for images to be broken into tiny dots that presses could reproduce. Before that, any photograph meant for a newspaper or magazine had to be redrawn as an engraving or lithograph, which inevitably softened its realism and kept nineteenth-century visual culture tied to older image-making methods even as new ones emerged.

Leja also examines the influence of images in politics. He notes that one of their earliest uses in campaigns came during the 1840 presidential election, in which the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison ran against the Democrat Martin Van Buren. A Democratic slur suggesting that the aging Harrison should retire to a log cabin with a jug of hard cider quickly backfired. The Whigs adopted the image and turned Harrison—despite his elite Virginia background and spacious Ohio mansion—into a rugged frontier figure. Printed campaign materials—posters, pamphlets, pins, and various novelties—showed log cabins, cider barrels, axes, raccoons, and related symbols to create a simple, relatable persona for their candidate. Harrison’s military fame, earned by his victory over Native American forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, was also bolstered by popular depictions of him as a commanding officer on horseback. The image-driven “Log Cabin” campaign was decisive in helping Harrison win, though he died about a month after taking office.

Pictures were also crucial in shaping the reputation of Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano who toured the United States beginning in 1850. Known as the Swedish Nightingale, Lind quickly became the object of a nationwide craze, partly driven by the circulation of printed images. Engravings depicting her first American concert, held at New York’s Castle Garden in September 1850 and organized by P.T. Barnum, were reproduced widely. Portraits of Lind—a simple, proper-looking woman whose modest appearance only amplified her appeal—were printed in newspapers, broadsides, and song sheets and contributed to the emergence of modern celebrity culture in America.

Leja explains how pictures reinforced middle-class values, especially through the illustrated magazines that became popular in the mid-1800s. Two serious magazines from the 1830s, The Family Magazine and the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, included high-quality engravings and educational content designed to cultivate an informed citizenry. However, the public grew more interested in livelier fare, such as that offered by later illustrated weekly magazines like The Flag of Our Union, Harper’s Weekly, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which featured images ranging from action scenes to snapshots of American daily life. One of the weeklies typically promoted itself as “an elegant, moral, and refined miscellaneous family journal.”

To reach the broadest audience, these magazines avoided the slavery debates that divided the nation. One called itself “a National paper…designed to embrace the interests of the entire Union, and addressing itself to North and South, East and West, impartially.” Another promised “neutrality on all sectarian questions.”

Besides showing how magazines distracted readers from heated issues, Leja discusses how images presented an idealized view of politicians who in fact held deeply opposed positions. Historians like Joanne B. Freeman have demonstrated that the increasingly contentious political climate of the pre–Civil War years was reflected in fights among congressmen that sometimes turned violent. Freeman records more than seventy such incidents from 1830 to 1860.¹ However, the illustrators Leja focuses on portrayed Congress as calm and dignified. He highlights a widely circulated engraving, copied from a daguerreotype, in which many US senators are sitting quietly while Henry Clay—known as the Great Compromiser—stands and delivers a speech.

Leja’s point about using pictures to promote national unity leads him to briefly discuss Walt Whitman, the great democratic poet of the antebellum era. He includes quotes from a poem in which Whitman describes his head as a gallery where “many pictures hang suspended”:

It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories!

Whitman once said that everything in his poems was “literally photographed.” This is especially clear in his famous catalogs—long sequences of descriptions of people and natural phenomena rendered with photographic immediacy. He went far beyond any of the illustrators Leja discusses in advocating for national unity, because his poetic images include not only public figures but also ordinary workers, urban rowdies, fugitive slaves, and prostitutes—all placed on the same democratic plane.

Leja’s mention of Whitman reveals certain gaps in his history. Three aspects of Whitman’s poetry that reflect the era—political subversiveness, sexual candor, and proto-surrealist stylistic experimentation—also surface in illustrations from the period, yet Leja addresses them only in passing. Whitman, while praising ordinary Americans, harshly criticized “swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics” and imagined President Franklin Pierce eating “dirt and excrement” while seated on cushions of “filth and blood.” This grim view of political opponents also showed up in many cartoons depicting fierce ideological battles—such as one of Charles Sumner being violently caned by an enraged southern congressman in the Senate or racist caricatures of Black people used in satirical cartoons to mock antislavery Republicans. Leja’s argument that illustrations were a politically neutered diversion tells only part of the story.

Whitman’s celebration of physical intimacy and bodily functions caused his poetry to be linked with the pornography of his time. Although this claim was exaggerated, it highlights the popularity of sexually themed books and images during that period. In 1855 a commentator noted the widespread popularity of “Yellow Jacket Literature,” which he called “public poison—a demoralizing literature, the real ‘Pandora’s box of evil passions.’” These pamphlet novels, sold at street bookstalls and railway stations, released a “stream of pollution, sending forth its pestilential branches to one great ocean of immorality.”² They often included sexually suggestive pictures that, while tame by today’s standards, were considered scandalous at the time. Also in wide circulation were stand-alone pornographic images that were said to corrupt America’s youth and encourage masturbation, which was thought to cause insanity and even death. Leja mentions a lithographer who was so successful with a salacious picture of Helen Jewett’s murder “that he followed it with obscene prints and books in the thousands.” Leja could have filled out A Flood of Pictures by providing examples of such images.

He might have also expanded on the premodernist trends common in the antebellum imagination. His point that young Winslow Homer’s magazine engravings, with their juxtapositions of unrelated scenes, anticipated twentieth-century collage art is intriguing but only the beginning. The era was full of similarly strange and jarring imagery. Whitman’s poems sometimes embrace this sensibility: the line “[I] am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over” hints at a cultural style already leaning toward the surreal and the fantastical. This tendency is even clearer in the visual culture of the time. The imagery in the Davy Crockett almanacs, for example, presented scenes of complete absurdity: a giant fly calmly fishing from a riverbank while a human struggles at the end of its hook; an ax-wielding hog about to behead a man lying on a chopping block; Davy riding a streak of lightning across the sky.³ Dark reform novels pushed the grotesque even further. In George Cheever’s temperance tract Deacon Giles’s Distillery, skeletal demons operate the machinery of sin, while George Lippard’s best-selling novel The Quaker City depicts nightmarish figures such as the distorted Devil-Bug and a corpse-like man sitting upright in a coffin drifting on a river. These images, scattered throughout popular culture, form a zany undercurrent that complicates any simple account of antebellum visual life.

Although Leja sometimes downplays these unruly elements, his achievement remains considerable. He has assembled a wide-ranging and visually rich account of a transformative period in American culture. His examples capture the diversity of images that circulated during these decades, from the pious to the sensational, the instructive to the entertaining.

More broadly, his study prompts reflection on the rising influence of images in American life. Already in the nineteenth century observers were pointing out the growing importance of visual media and their ability to alter how people focus their attention. The old worry that images might compete with words now seems almost quaint: the “rage for pictures” identified in 1848 has not lessened; it has grown exponentially, taking new forms and reaching new heights, and images dominate the cultural scene now more than ever before. The more urgent question is what occurs when visual media become the main way we connect with the world. Images provide immediacy and accessibility, but they can also oversimplify and diminish experience. By giving in to their charm, we risk losing not only the depth that comes with sustained reading but also the habits of thinking that such reading encourages.