Print of Allen Memorial Hospital
Title/Subject: Allen Memorial Hospital
Artist: Arthur Ludwig Princehorn (American, 1870-1931)
Date: 1925
Type: lithograph or photograph
Dimensions: 7 1/2" h x 7 1/4" w (image); 11 3/8" h x 10 1/4" w (paper)
Collection: Arthur Ludwig and Arthur Ewing Princehorn Collection (RG 30/416)
The Allen Memorial Hospital in Oberlin, built in 1925, was designed by Cass Gilbert, the college architect from the 1910s to 1930s. He is best known as the architect of the Woolworth Building (1911-13) in New York City. The Spanish Eclectic style of the hospital, with its soft stucco exterior, low-pitched, red tile roof, brickwork, and arched doorway and windows with painted, bas-relief tiles, is a fitting subject for this subtle print that emphasizes the romantic style of the building.A negative of the hospital entrance was used to create the image (the same used for the photograph at right), then hand-colored. Around the image is an indentation showing where the paper was impressed with a plate or stone. It may be that this print is a lithograph with a negative image, but it may also be a photograph on sensitized paper that had been pressed on a plate before exposure. There were many processes used by photographers in the early twentieth century.
Before the invention of photography and into the early twentieth century, architects employed lithographic prints to document their completed projects in color, and it may be that this work was produced for that reason. The print is signed by the photographer Arthur Ludwig Princehorn (father of Arthur Ewing Princehorn) and dated the year of the completion of the building. Cass Gilbert may have ordered multiple copies of this print. This is the only lithographic or hand-colored print from a negative in the College Archives, complementing Princehorn's other architectural photography.
A former Oberlin student, Arthur L. Princehorn was the College's first photographer, from 1917 to his sudden death on the job in 1931. Thereafter his son Arthur Ewing Princehorn filled that role, after working with his father beginning in 1929. Prior to his appointment at Oberlin, Arthur Ludwig was the preparator and curator at the Glen Island Museum of Natural History, where he photographed members of the Sioux tribe in 1901. In 1898 he invented a camera that is credited as the precursor of the Graflex. Princehorn was an accomplished photographer, documenting Oberlin College events; producing portraits, including all-college panoramas; and extensively photographing Oberlin's built environment and campus views in the early twentieth century.
Princehorn's holiday card from about 1930 features a photograph of the Memorial Arch in the snow on campus, one of the most frequently photographed structures in Princehorn's work for the College. The inside of the card (right), signed by father and son in the "Photographic Department," is a modernist montage of shadows cast by their photographic equipment.
Sources
Georg Fritz, Photo-Lithography, translated by E. J. Wall (London: Dawbarn and Ward, Limited, 1895). Project Gutenberg EBook, published 11/14/2017.
Graphics Atlas, Image Permanence Institute, College of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) (accessed 11/15/2020).
Assistance from Ed Vermue, Special Collections and Preservation Librarian, Oberlin College Libraries.
Related Collections
Geoffrey T. Blodgett Papers (RG 30/263)
Cass Gilbert Collection (RG 30/124)
Arthur Ludwig and Arthur Ewing Princehorn Collection (RG 30/416)
Photographs: Buildings & Monuments (RG 32/4)