Christopher Columbus

This portrait engraving by Jacques Reich depicts Columbus in Renaissance dress, rendered in the detailed crosshatching technique characteristic of late-nineteenth-century newspaper illustration. The work exemplifies the visual approaches that dominated periodical portraiture during an era when wood-engraved and steel-engraved portraits served as primary visual documentation in dailies and Sunday supplements. Such portrait studies, while not narrative comic strips, shared printing technology and artistic conventions with the developing sequential art forms that would emerge in newspaper comics. The formal rendering and careful modeling of features reflect the engraver's craft that preceded and influenced early comic art's visual vocabulary.