“I” is for “Italian”

Abstract

Italian “image peddlers” sold small plaster sculptural reproductions door to door in the United States during the nineteenth century. Representations of these street vendors illuminate the histories of the art reproductions market, emigration of the Italian Catholic artisans who produced and sold classical and Renaissance figurines, and the Protestant middle-class consumers who purchased them. Using print images from abecedaries (alphabet books) and children’s geographies, this article reveals how an idealized view of the fine arts among the public overrode long-held antipathy toward Catholic imagery and the Italian peddlers themselves. Furthermore, it identifies the central figure of Francis W. Edmonds’s 1844 painting the Image Pedlar as an Italian image peddler. His identity has been overlooked because of the secular inventory on his tray and lack of reference to ethnicity in the painting’s title. These factors allowed viewers to appreciate Edmonds’s subject of an American family enjoying a variety of arts without being discomforted by their own anti-Catholic and anti-Italian biases.