Louisiana Heron, from the Game Birds series (N40) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1888 - 1890

This is a chromolithograph, made around 1888 by Allen and Ginter as one of a series of collectible cards included in packs of cigarettes. These cards weren’t conceived as high art, but as a cheap premium, yet the printing process itself was painstaking. Each color required a separate limestone matrix, prepared by a skilled artisan. The sheets would be run through the press as many as twenty times to achieve the final image. Given the quantity of cards produced for wide distribution, the labor involved would have been considerable. Think too about the subject matter: the heron, a wild creature, reduced to a token of consumer culture. So, in the end, it’s not just a picture of a bird but a complicated document of its time, capturing the relationship between industrial production, natural resources, and popular taste. It invites us to consider how such images reflect shifting attitudes towards nature and labor in a rapidly industrializing world.