Pampano, from the Fish from American Waters series (N8) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands 1889

Curator: We’re standing before “Pampano,” a print using coloured pencils made in 1889 by Allen & Ginter, part of their “Fish from American Waters” series. Editor: Immediately, I'm struck by the sense of shimmering fragility; it feels almost dreamlike despite being so representational. Curator: It's fascinating how they've captured the subtle gradations of colour using coloured pencils – the way the blues blend into the golds and oranges, creating this pearlescent effect. The composition, too, with the fish centred and seemingly suspended in the water. Editor: Right, but that sense of suspension reads so differently now. I wonder about the colonial underpinnings of collecting and cataloguing nature this way, reducing the living, breathing pampano to a specimen, an aesthetic object. It mirrors how marginalized communities were studied and commodified during that same period. Curator: Certainly, that colonial gaze is something we can't ignore. However, the meticulous detail and the artist's attempt to faithfully render the fish's anatomy—look at the delicate spines on its dorsal fin or the precise rendering of its eye. Editor: Yes, a fidelity produced for a cigarette brand. These collectible cards reinforced the consumerism interwoven with this kind of detached scientific observation and created a false sense of wonder. Curator: Well, wonder, or perhaps more of an understanding for the common man. The Allen & Ginter company was aiming to promote their cigarettes and also to create beautifully crafted objects that served as both promotional tools and collector’s items. Editor: Ultimately, it speaks volumes about how nature, then and now, gets filtered through capitalist and colonial ideologies. It makes you wonder about the politics embedded in something that seems as simple as a fish portrait. Curator: It invites us to look carefully at the relationship between artistic representation and consumerism at the turn of the century. A peculiar but insightful object. Editor: Precisely, a reminder that even depictions of nature are never truly neutral but laden with power, class, and cultural assumptions.