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

Curator: Before us is “Brook Trout,” a colored-pencil drawing created around 1889. It’s from the series "Fish from American Waters," part of a promotional set for Allen & Ginter cigarettes. Editor: My initial impression is one of delicacy. The composition centers the trout in this hazy, pale-blue space. I'm struck by the precision of the line work in its fins and scales. Curator: This imagery, though seemingly simple, taps into something deeper than just fish as a product. Fish often appear in cultural symbols related to transformation. Its streamlined shape echoes concepts of fluidity and grace, but within the context of this series, it points to a unique angle toward turn-of-the-century ideals of luxury. Editor: True, but even devoid of explicit symbolism, the colored pencils offer the trout this luminous quality. It’s like gazing through water. It calls into play texture through those colored dots that articulate a certain liveliness—even though the fish itself is clearly no longer swimming. Curator: Precisely! It mirrors the cultural moment. There was growing industrialization but also burgeoning conservationist awareness. Even these delicate drawings show our desire to pin down fleeting, wild moments and preserve an idealized relationship to nature that would, perhaps, feel lost later on. The symbolism of the trout here, thus, encapsulates nostalgia and potential loss. Editor: So we see a study of the thing itself—an isolated Brook Trout—as well as a layered cultural artifact. We can view it as a specimen but also recognize it’s not a “neutral” scientific rendering; it’s imbued with a visual and symbolic rhetoric about what late 19th-century Americans were striving toward and feared. Curator: Absolutely. By carefully selecting images like these, advertisers inadvertently gave us portals into understanding how previous eras filtered the world through their dreams, desires, and consumer products. Editor: Which gives us so much more to think about when faced with the elegance of its composition! The very lines are part of the larger current.