Chromolithograph Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827-1895) Astronomical Drawings New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [Reproduced from the original drawings by Armstrong & Company, Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts], 1882 Science, Industry and Business Library, The New York Public Library Astor Library     (92 k)

E. L. Trouvelot, a French-born artist and amateur astronomer, spent 1872—74 working with the 15-inch refractor at the Harvard Observatory. During this time he prepared a number of large pastel drawings representing, as he wrote in his Astronomical Drawings, "the celestial phenomena as they appear to the trained eye and to an experienced draughtsman through the great modern telescopes." To illustrate the principal classes of celestial objects and phenomena, Trouvelot selected fifteen of these drawings to be reproduced using chromolithography, an illustration process that was at the zenith of its development in the 1880s.