Color lithograph depicting two young girls in a bedroom. One of the little girls appears to be ill, and she is seated in a brass bed under a quilt drink from a cup and saucer. The other girl, with more color in her cheeks, is cutting food on a plate that has been set on the bedspread while she looks on attentively at the other girl. The image is mounted on cardboard within a decorative blue, red, white, and gold printed frame.
Label Text:
Lithographs were a popular decoration for the middle-class Victorian home, especially in the years following the Civil War when the technology improved allowing for finer prints, available at lower costs through mass production. In addition to popular art prints, lithographs populated publications of the era. Books, trade literature, catalogues, periodicals all used chromolithographs to illustrate their pages. Advertising art such as trade cards, labels, posters, and pages in magazines relied heavily on the lithographic process dynamic illustrations to attract attention to their products. The attractive designs and illustrations led to the popular hobby of collecting trade cards and pages from various publications in the late nineteenth century. Prints were kept in albums, hung on walls, put in frames, and added to scrapbooks. Lithography remained the most popular form of printing throughout the nineteenth century until offset printing replaced it in the late 1930s.
