Antique New Jersey / Delaware Valley Print - Trenton Street Railway Company - Majestic Classically Clad Woman Holding Lightning Bolts

Treasures from THE PHILADELPHIA / DELAWARE VALLEY COLLECTION at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 10 x 24 and consciously formatted to work with a 10 x 24 frame, or custom framed as you see fit. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

Some years back we bought several historic properties in Burlington, New Jersey and moved upriver for a few years. I spent considerable energy trying to convince my friends to come up and help me buy up the town and transform it into a groover's riverside paradise. OK, so I'm good at other things.

Anyway, I set up my studio in a little circa 1800 storefront next to the amazing late 1700s Burlington Quaker Meeting House, which replaced a smaller octagonal late 1600s meeting house. Across the street was a big ass McCrory's 5 & 10, empty, with a very broad expanse of storefront windows.

When the state and taxpayers of New Jersey agreed to put a light rail through town along the same rail bed that had carried trains in the 1830s, I got the town all worked up to have an appropriate whoopin' and hollerin' celebration. In anticipation of that I started to gather raw images for a show to fill up all the McCrory's windows, on my own, and digitally restored, printed, mounted and hung a pretty happenin' display of train, trolley and bus images, all New Jersey related, covering 1840s to the 1940s.

One of those images was this handsome detail from a stock certificate, printed in Philadelphia at the legendary American Bank Note Company. As you know, I'm not the least bit shy about completely disassembling and rebuilding an antique graphic to transform it into something worthy of bringing into your life, but this one was simply a matter of removing the rest of the document to give focus to this magnificent sidebar. Looking into it, I can only imagine the pride of the original engraver at the strength and power of this complete thought, and the craftsmanship that went into its creation.

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.