Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images by Ron Tyler (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images by Ron Tyler
• Michael Grauer

Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. By Ron Tyler. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. Pp. 640. Illustrations, notes, index.)

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, ever so slightly, regarding Texas:

"Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wraths of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing … Texas [is] yet unsung. Yet [Texas] is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imaginations."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," 1844

After nearly 40 years of working on this massive project, Ron Tyler has provided a careful, thoughtful, and sensitive examination of Texas as seen by outside observers who 'learned' about Texas through popular imagery; and almost exclusively from lithographs.

While most believe they learned truths of the American West, and certain locales in particular such as Texas, via the printed word, images accompanied those "truths" to further solidify beliefs about Texas in popular thought. Initially wood engravings, a painstaking yet fairly inexpensive method for disseminating the sketches of an artist in the field through mass reproduction, these images then found a more nuanced medium in lithography, as Tyler clearly demonstrates. He captures the allure to the artist of the lithographic medium in his penetrating analysis of the evolution of Texas imagery through depictions of myths, landscape, city views, Confederacy, and—especially fascinating--"The Image Breakers."

Having lived on the Llano Estacado for 31 years and wandered all over West Texas, this reviewer especially appreciated Tyler's circumspection in [End Page 352] relaying the exaggerations found in the reports of Randolph B. Marcy, Amiel W. Whipple, and William H. Emory. The "mid-nineteenth-century explorers' groping for perspective" relied upon their only artistic frame of reference--Picturesque and Romantic--for the fantastical scenes they encountered, including the exoticism of Native Americans. Tyler's chapter "Pretty Pictures … 'Candy' for the Immigrants" also strikes close to home. My German ancestors immigrated to Illinois from southwestern Germany in the 1870s, then to Kansas and Texas, likely drawn by lithographs espousing the rich lands there such as Panorama der Stadt Neu-Braunfels in Texas …, as discussed by Tyler.

Tyler's chapter "The Image Breakers" is especially effective when he dissects the myriad images of "cowboys" circulated via popular lithographs. While Tyler may not be entirely correct in some of his interpretations of a man in a Western hat vs. an actual cowhand, his synthesis of the evolution of the cowboy as THE symbol of Texas is spot on. He writes, "a cowboy roping cattle" on a trading card for A. H. Belo's Galveston News "demonstrates … the respectability the cowboy had attained in personifying the image of the state." (p. 357) I couldn't have said it better myself. With excellent methodical analysis and exemplary, sometimes surprising, reproductions, Tyler's Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images should find a treasured place in all libraries, especially those dedicated to world, American, and Texas history and art.

Michael Grauer National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association ...