Echo Lake, Franconia, N. H.

A scarce lithograph depicting Echo Lake in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, at the foot of Cannon Mountain, after a painting or drawing by Benjamin Stone.

A wonderfully subtle image printed on India paper, this moody lithograph captures the wildness and majesty of the scene, with a dramatic burst of light breaking through the otherwise glowering sky and spilling across the mountainside.

Landscape artist Benjamin Bellows Grant Stone (1829-1906) studied with White Mountains painter Benjamin Champney and Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey. His works were exhibited at the National Academy and Boston Athenaeum. After serving as an army officer in the Civil War, Stone lived in Catskill, New York, and focused on painting, journalism and politics. He is noted for his charcoal landscapes.

John Henry Bufford (1810-1870) was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and in 1829 began apprenticing as a lithographer with the Pendleton firm in Boston, during the period when American lithography was just starting to become a technique used in commercial printing. Remaining with Pendleton until 1835, Bufford then left to start his own firm in New York. Here he printed book illustrations, sheet music covers, city views, and copies of popular artworks. Bufford also produced prints depicting disastrous fires, and worked as an artist for the Endicott and Currier firms in New York. Upon returning to Boston in 1840, he and his brother-in-law B. W. Thayer and John E. Moody bought out Pendleton, owned by Thomas Moore since 1836. Bufford worked as the primary artist and general manager of the new company, B. W. Thayer & Co., which was one of the first color lithographers in the U.S.-producing work from several stones as early as 1843 or 1844. When Thayer left the company in 1845, the firm became J. H. Bufford & Co. Bufford was one of the most important lithographers in antebellum America-his work encompassing city views, posters, book illustrations, sheet music covers, and prints for framing. Early in their careers, both Winslow Homer and Francis D'Avignon worked for Bufford. In 1865, Bufford's sons Frank and John Henry Jr. became partners in his company. Following their father's death in 1870, the brothers continued operating the firm until the early 1900s.

WorldCat records just two copies, at the Boston Athenaeum and AAS.

REFERENCES: Groce, George C. and David H. Wallace. The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America 1564-1860, p. 606; Pierce, Sally and Catharina Slautterback. Boston Lithography, 1825-1880 (Boston, 1991), pp. 130-32; Last, Jay T. The Color Explosion (Santa Ana, California: Hillcrest Press, 2005), pp. 47-48.