Scope and Content Note
Collection contains about 6,000 picture sheets known as Bilderbogen, Imagerie d'Epinal, and Lubok prints from German, French, Russian, Spanish, and other European publishers. Produced for entertainment, education, and decoration, Bilderbogen date primarily from the mid-1800s to World War I. The prints are often in bright colors and show multiple images on the same sheet of paper to portray a fairytale or historical event in narrative frames with a short text. Among the common topics and genres are religious, military battle, and sentimental scenes; portraits and caricatures; and landscape and city views. Also of interest are the puppets (pantins) theaters and soldier figures to cut out and play with; game boards, bullseye targets, and coloring sheets; silhouettes and shadow pictures; and adages and signs. Bound volumes of Münchener Bilderbogen are also included.
The picture sheets are typically hand-colored lithographs or engravings intended for amusement, decoration, education, and play. A strong focus is on such aspects of popular culture as children's literature, puppet and theater sets, games, tavern decorations and signs, and treatment of minority groups. Military history, another collection strength, includes some American Civil War scenes and many sheets from the 1848 revolution in Germany, the Franco-Prussian War, and World War I. The paper soldier sets offer an opportunity to examine uniform styles. Additional prints depict the built environment, in several European countries, as well as the mythologized American landscape as interpreted by European artists. A few World War II, post-war East German works of art and posters about Bilderbogen exhibitions are also included.
Of special interest is a complete set of 60 stories for children told in 12 to 16 scenes on the same sheet. Imagerie d'Épinal created this set with English text for sale by the Humoristic Publishing Co, Kansas City, Missouri. This type of Bilderbogen has been described as a forerunner of comic strips. Other highlights are the brightly colored life-size figures, the puppets with moveable parts (pantins), and the small images intended for use as stickers or as decoration on baked goods. The more than 200 folk art prints created in Russia are known as Lubok (plural Lubki).
Historical Note
Bilderbogen prints were a popular graphic art form published commercially primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were typically hand-colored lithographs intended to inform and entertain the viewer. Important publishers of Bilderbogen were located in Epinal in the French Vosges as well as in southern Germany cities: Nuremberg, Munich, Augsburg, and Stuttgart. Bilderbogen production was concentrated, however, in Neuruppin in northern Germany where Johann Bernhard Kühn is considered the founder of the Bilderbogen tradition in the early 1800s. His son, Gustav Kühn took over the company, which produced more than 10,000 motifs before closing in the 1930s. The Dietrich Hecht collection is especially strong in popular prints published in Wissembourg on the French-German border by F.C. Wentzel and his successor Rudolph Ackermann. By the end of the 1800s and start of the 1900s, it was common for print runs to exceed 200,000 on such popular topics as the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. The prints were considered ephemera and passed from viewer to viewer until they fell apart or were thrown away because they were no longer considered newsworthy.
The compiler of this collection, Dietrich Hecht, lives in Germany and first learned about the history of Bilderbogen in the 1970s. He concentrated on classic categories of popular graphic art prints from the 18th century and 19th centuries as well as Ausschneidebogen (cut out sheets), Soldatenbogen (soldier sheets), caricatures, Anschauungsbogen (views), Wandbilddrucke (mural prints), Papiertheaterbogen (paper theater sheets), current affairs, and advertisements. In 1995 he sold his first collection of approximately 5,500 Bilderbogen to the Neuruppin Museum in Germany. Hecht continued collecting, and his second collection of about 6,000 prints was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2009, with an addition in 2021. To gain further insights and for professional exchange he was an active member of the "Arbeitskreis Bild Druck Papier," which held regular meetings until 2017.