George Baxter’s Pictorial Album; or, Cabinet of Paintings provides an example of how art reproductions circulated before the discovery of photography. Like the portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia, these reproductions are made with Baxter’s chromolithography process and form part of Bruce Peel Special Collections' Cameron Collection of George Baxter Prints.
Around the same time as photography’s discovery, George Baxter developed a process of colour printing known as chromolithography, which he patented in 1835. The portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia seen here employ that process in order to create richly-coloured portraits that commemorate the powerful and the wealthy. In comparison to daguerreotypes of middle-class patrons like that of Mrs Morrow, these could be, and were intended to be, circulated widely in order to promote a public identity.
View Baxter's Cabinet of Paintings, another example of the chromolithographic process, as well as the Cameron Collection of George Baxter Prints, housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.