This monthly artistic portfolio printed by Ernest Edwards’ New York Photo-Gravure Company is a self-described Picture Periodical without Letter Press. In its first year, the publication grew from less than fifty subscribers to a monthly edition of four thousand. Responding to interest in a “higher grade of pictures” with emphasis on quality rather than quantity, the magazine transformed itself from its original concept of a “Photographic Record of Events” to an “Artistic Periodical.” By the fifth issue in January 1889, the shift was taking place; the lesser quality photomechanical method of photolithography was abandoned, and reproductions were by photogravure and “photogelatin” (collotype) only. Each issue typically featured a portfolio of eight high-quality, large photogravures and collotypes of artwork and artistic photography of leading artists and photographers of the day. [1]

James Leon Williams was a dentist, scientist, scholar, artist, and philosopher. While he is most noted as the first to discover plaque and the inventor of modern dentures, he was also a photographer of considerable ability, using photographic techniques for both artistic and scientific purposes. As a scientist, his microphotographic research confirmed the relationship between bacteria and tooth decay. As an artist, he was amongst the few American photographers to fully recognize the photogravure process as not only a technique for reproducing photographs, but an artform in its own right. Williams’ work is most akin to the school of photography founded by Peter Henry Emerson, where creating an atmospheric composition with soft peripheral focus would most closely resemble nature. He produced two fine photogravure picture books, The Home and haunts of Shakespeare (1892), and The land of Sleepy Hollow and the home of Washington Irving (1887).