NEW BOOK: AMERICA'S PAPER MONEY

America's Paper Money: A Canvas for an Emerging Nation
William L. Pressly

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690 became the first government in the Western world to print paper money, the imagery for which initiated an indigenous American art form of remarkable dynamism and originality. After the Revolutionary War, disillusioned by how quickly its promiscuous printing of Continental currency had led to hyperinflation, the U.S. government left it to private institutions such as state-chartered banks to carry on this artistic American tradition. Adorned with a vast variety of images, bank notes soon became the fledgling country's primary currency. With pressures of the Civil War, the federal government in 1861 began taking charge of the paper-money supply by creating a national currency; simultaneously, the Confederate States of America was creating a competing self-image, making heavy use of bank-note vignettes. Later, collaboration between government engravers and well-known artists on the 1896 Silver Certificates marked the apex of U.S. government currency design. For two centuries, American creativity and technical ingenuity resulted in imagery on paper money that helped create and enhance the nation's imagined self.

Publication Date: December 20, 2023

Availability: Electronically

I have written this book to open a more fruitful dialogue between the disciplines of art history and numismatics as applied to American paper money. The numismatic literature has undertaken the Herculean task of documenting this extremely large body of material. Eric Newman's publications on Continental and Colonial currency are exemplary, and multiple catalogers have categorized the national currencies produced, beginning in 1861, by the federal government of the United States of America and by the Confederate States of America. Between these two eras, however, documenting the vast quantity of bank notes has proved to be a more daunting challenge. James A. Haxby made an impressive beginning, and Q. David Bowers is pursuing an even more thorough state-by-state catalog of bank notes and related currency. Other authors, such as Richard Doty, Bob McCabe, Mark D. Tomasko, and Heinz Tschachler, have provided helpful insights into issues involving the images used by banknote engravers, including the technology of bank-note production. In addition, digitization is transforming access to this vast material. Databases, such as the Newman Numismatic Portal at Washington University in St. Louis, are putting illustrations of paper money, along with the critical literature, at one's fingertips. All this research provides an indispensable foundation for further exploration.

 

One of the deficiencies of numismatic writers that this book hopes to correct is the lack of knowledge of the artistic context in which these works were created. Ignorance of academic art, with its long tradition of complex iconographies and its mixture of allegorical figures with historical ones, has sometimes led to the misidentification of a vignette's subject. The origins of whole genres of subject matter have at times escaped notice. Images of children performing adult tasks are not American drolleries, as some commentators would have it, but are taken from the conventions of rococo art. Some researchers of American paper money, such as John A. Muscalus, have been remarkably adept at locating old-master and contemporary sources for images appearing on currency, but they rarely go beyond the simple identification of a source to assess the significance of such borrowings or how the original design might have changed in its adaptation to this new context.

On the other side of the ledger, one might ask why so few art historians, with the notable exception of Jennifer Roberts, have held back from exploring in depth American paper money. One reason is the concern that notes, the product of commercial printing, are viewed as exemplars of skilled craftsmanship rather than as original works of art. In this regard, paper money is seen as falling more within the purview of visual culture than art history. This book offers arguments to the contrary. It attempts to open to art historians and the public an area of American art that has been largely overlooked and to encourage numismatists to see this material in new ways.

 

I began collecting American paper money when I was in the fifth grade, and I often think this interest had an influence on my decision to become an art historian. Throughout my career, my area of study has been primarily eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, but I am glad now to be able to give something back to the field that first engaged my interest. While writing this book, my constant mantra has been ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short). This Latin phrase, first coined by Hippocrates in Greek, is often misinterpreted to mean that while one's life is fleeting, one's work will live on long after he or she has died. Instead, it means that one lifetime is too short a span in which to master an art. In my case, this is all too painfully true, but I am delighted to have been able to make a beginning.

To read the complete book, see:
America's Paper Money: A Canvas for an Emerging Nation (https://scholarlypress.si.edu/store/all/americas-paper-money-a-canvas-for-an-emerging-nation/)

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