Catching Fireflies

Ground mica powder, now worn and cracked, originally made the night sky of this print luminous, providing a fitting backdrop to the glow of the fireflies. Artists used mica intermittently from the 1790s into the early 1800s in order to create more luxurious prints. From time to time, the government employed sumptuary laws—laws preventing extravagance—to ban the use of mica because it made prints too expensive. Even when it was legal to do so, artists likely produced mica backgrounds in limited numbers. Probably fewer than 20 prints with this design have survived, and most of them are now in museum collections.