ABOUT THE PRINTS

Wood engraver Mercedes Lambcke Herold created prints that are serene settings that romanticized and embodied life in the Adirondacks. According to the Historic Saranac Lake Wiki, she was an art student in Germany when she met her husband, Dr. Carl Herold. Eventually she followed her husband, who likely suffered from tuberculosis, to Saranac Lake, New York. Her husband Carl was a patient of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, a prominent doctor who focused on healing those suffering from tuburculosis through exposure to the clean air found in the Adirondacks. During this time, people from urban settings who were searching for a cure in Saranac Lake left lasting artistic legacies behind. The couple called Saranac Lake their home while her husband established his own medical practice there. Mercedes Herold lived in Saranac Lake until she and her husband moved to Manhattan in the 1940s. In the 1950s, as a widow, she made her way back to the Adirondacks, inhabiting the nearby town of North Elba.

These relief prints are wood engravings, one of the oldest forms of printmaking. In wood engraving, the endgrain of a block of wood is carved out by knives and other tools to create a detailed image. Ink is then applied to the block, and pressure is used to transfer the image to paper. In the farm scene, goats, a chicken, cat, and farmer are seen with a small rustic looking shanty in the foreground and a small barn in the back. The background consists of a plowed field with a mountainous landscape behind multiple trees. Similarly, the mill scene focuses on a small building with a few trees and a stream running through the foreground of the image. The lack of color allows the texture used by the wood block to stand out along with permitting the viewer’s imagination to fill in the colors. Through the repetition of natural elements along with the use of quaint and rustic human dwellings, Herold’s prints serve as a promotion of the simplicity and serenity found in the Adirondacks. -Jaeleigh Jacot

 

Mercedes Herold
Untitled (Adirondack farm), c. 1930s
SLU 2012.35
Untitled (mill scene), ca. 1930s
SLU 2013.7
Wood engravings
Richard F. Brush Art Gallery
St. Lawrence University
Canton, NY