Golden Carp, from the series Fishers and Fish (N74) for Duke brand cigarettes 1888

Curator: Oh, this one has charm! It feels so… sweetly odd. There’s something wonderfully off-kilter about it. Editor: Indeed! We’re looking at “Golden Carp, from the series Fishers and Fish (N74) for Duke brand cigarettes.” Created around 1888 by Knapp & Company, it’s a lithograph enhanced with colored pencil and gouache. Currently it resides here at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curator: Knapp & Company, you say? That makes a bit more sense. It has that distinct late 19th-century commercial art feel. It's got that blend of precision and the slightly exaggerated features that you'd see promoting products. Look at that tiny, button nose! Editor: You know, it reminds me of a slightly gentrified Ukiyo-e print! It borrows some elements of genre-painting, that sense of everyday life captured, but filters it through this lens of, as you say, advertisement and caricature. This feels intentionally quaint and approachable. Curator: Absolutely! Think of what the image is doing! The fishing motif immediately associates Duke cigarettes with leisure, and an attainable form of recreation. Plus, the carp itself! Across cultures the carp embodies persistence, and transformation because of their ability to swim upstream! I wonder if viewers unconsciously transfer those positive qualities onto the product? Editor: That's fascinating! I also keep coming back to that water; it's a field of blue-green, a wash that simplifies the aquatic environment in the extreme, creating this lovely, almost childlike rendering of reality. Everything, the roses, the pom-pom on her hat… it reads as joyfully inauthentic to me. It understands its own constructed-ness, like a play within a play. It creates that gap between reality and artifice to offer… not truth, perhaps, but delight. Curator: I completely agree! This isn't about realism. It's about creating a world—a simplified, ideal world— where everything feels brighter and easier. I imagine it made those cigarettes look all the more appealing! It’s more than just promotion of a product—it promoted a whole lifestyle. Editor: A tiny paper gateway to a daydream... a momentary escape from the late 19th-century anxieties. Well, now I want a cigarette and a fishing rod, haha! Curator: I wouldn't recommend the first one. But as for the art... the artwork made me realize how ubiquitous symbolism really is—and just how early advertisers caught onto it.