A Glorious Harvest From The Prestele Family Tree

(The Papers Of Wilhelm Heinrich - (William Henry) Prestele, Special Collections,)

Few of us pay much attention to the red maple tree. It is just there, a large, symmetrical shade tree that erupts into blazing color for two weeks in fall but otherwise recedes into the urban forest.

But study the tree, as an artist named Joseph Prestele did, and you begin to see its hidden beauty, its dusky red flowers, naked and tightly clustered in early March and apt to catch the low rays of the sun. And then the leaves, big green hands, steel-blue beneath and with candy-apple-red stalks. And the seed pods, the samaras, winged orbs with pink tints. In 1851, Prestele spent uncounted hours in artistic veneration of Acer rubrum , transferring the handsome botanical drawings of an illustrator named Isaac Sprague to stone. Prestele used needles to scratch his copy of the painting through a film of gum laid over the slab. This is the way lithographs are made, and while Prestele was an excellent illustrator in his own right, he was a superb lithographer, trained in the old school in his native Bavaria.

Like the red maple itself, botanical illustrators and lithographers go unnoticed. A current exhibition of Prestele's work at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville seeks to rectify that. In addition to the work of Prestele, the exhibition examines the paintings of his three sons: the eldest, Joseph Jr., Gottlieb and the youngest, William Henry.

Two aspects of the exhibition in particular form a poignant call and echo between father and son: Joseph Prestele created the maple lithograph for a major project on American trees by Asa Gray, the preeminent American botanist of the mid-19th century. William Henry Prestele capped his career 40 years later by chronicling the native species of grapes for a botanist and grape champion named Thomas Munson. Both monumental projects, which spawned some of the sweetest renderings of American flora, were not published. They died on the vine, so to speak, victims of that peculiarly Washington trapdoor, the budget overrun.

More than a century later, the organizers of the exhibition, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Agricultural Library, have given a measure of exposure to these hidden jewels and to the Presteles themselves.

Many of the lithographs and watercolors on display come from the Amana Heritage Society, as well as the private collection of Marcelee Konish of Murrysville, Pa., who was joined by other Prestele (now pronounced Prest-a-lay) descendants for a reception April 27.

The elder Prestele was a member of a Christian sect that sailed from Europe to establish a community near Buffalo in the early 1840s. Thirteen years later, the group moved to Amana, Iowa. As humble and cloistered as he was, Prestele made contact with Gray, who quickly came to value him as a lithographer. Good ones who could work on stone (as opposed to copper) were rare, and Prestele was, to boot, a naturalist, a fine painter and a printer.

The tree book, titled "The Forest Trees of North America," was begun in 1848. Gray's distractions, trips abroad and perfectionism caused it to drag on until the sponsor, the Smithsonian Institution, abandoned the project in the late 1850s after the completion of approximately 20 plates.

In addition to the red maple, the exhibition features the colored plates of the umbrella magnolia and the common tulip poplar.

The show also shines light on the little-known art of lithography, displaying the stone slab, two pages wide, that Prestele used to engrave the red maple and the mountain maple, a shrubby tree of Appalachia.

In the exhibition catalogue, the Hunt's Gavin D.R. Bridson explains the stone engraver's method: The original image is copied, reversed, onto a smooth, well polished slab of stone that is covered in gum arabic mixed with nitric acid. The coating is pigmented to allow the engraver to see his progress with steel and diamond-tipped needles of various thicknesses. The object is not so much to engrave the stone as expose it. Once the artwork is finished, the entire slab is rubbed with an oil that is absorbed by the lines in the stone. This primes the image for a second treatment with an oily ink. The stone is then cleaned, a process that removes the gum covering along with the unwanted ink. Printer's ink then is daubed on to the stone, but because the surface is wet, the ink adheres only to the previously oiled image.

The stone is put on a press, where the image is transferred to the printed page. It is not yet ready for binding: The image must be hand-painted, a skilled technique requiring a botanist's eye for subtle shading.

Commercial printers would have used shortcuts and partial automation to achieve an inferior result, Bridson said. "It was uneconomic for most people to do it that way," Bridson said in an interview. Prestele "was an oddball working in the backwoods, but doing exactly what the botanists loved."

The Presteles' story, of course, is the American story of an immigrant coming here for religious freedom, and of the children quickly assimilating into the melting pot. Gottleib stayed in Amana to aid his father, but Joseph Jr. and William left the sect behind. After the Civil War (William had joined a New York regiment), the two brothers moved to Illinois to work for the type of large mail-order nursery that thrived in 19th-century America. Nurseries needed artists to illustrate plump gooseberries and robust cabbages for seed packets and sales brochures. (Folks far from city markets simply grew their own fruit and vegetables.)

In the late 1880s, William arrived in Washington for one of the more unusual jobs in government, to paint fruit varieties for the Department of Agriculture. One of his first assignments was for the ambitious book on grapes, sponsored by the department and authored by Munson. Munson had moved to north Texas in search of wild American grapes and found there his Shangri-La. In time, Munson came to identify 29 species of native grape, almost half the grape species on the planet.

So William set to work and, as the exhibit shows, produced some sterling portraits of vines, breathing the artist's life into dried specimens that Munson had sent him. No trait went unrecorded, including the size of the pith. Leaves were neatly turned up at the edges to show the color and venation of their undersides. In the blue grape, we see the gray blue under leaf. In the Vitis champini , we see a checkerboard lower leaf surface. This is some of William Prestele's best work, but the book project was axed when the department realized that publishing it would blow its entire printing budget. Congress was asked to fund it, but never did.

Munson went on to stage what he described as the biggest ever exhibit of the grape at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. William Prestele went back to painting other fruit. He died in 1895, spending his last years dutifully and quietly capturing fleeting floral subjects for posterity, just as his father had done before him.

The Prestele exhibit runs until May 31 in the main reading room of the National Agricultural Library, 10301 Baltimore Ave., Beltsville. Weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 301-504-6503, http://www.nal.usda.gov/ .