Reproduction and Reliability

This is a column of advertisements from page 63 of Harper’s Weekly that seem to be connected by their reference to images. Taken together with Chapter 8 of The Moonstone, when Franklin and Rachel begin their “decorative painting” (Collins 51), these ads question the value of images. At the top of the page, “Prang’s American Chromos,” advertises their “facsimiles of Oil and Watercolor paintings by the best masters” (Harper’s 63). The boudoir project is also a facsimile, made up of details “copied from designs made by a famous Italian painter” (Collins 51). Prang’s artwork is made using a process called “chromo-lithography,” which involves reproducing an existing work using layers of color and chemicals (“Chromolithograph”) to ensure that “not only the brush-marks, but the very lines of the canvas” are visible (Harper’s 63).

Franklin’s “vehicle” is not the novel’s only example of when chemicals are used to recreate something in a layered process similar to chromolithography. After discovering that he unwittingly stole the diamond under the influence of opium, Franklin again subjects himself to the chemical in an investigative experiment. In doing so, the events of Rachel’s birthday can be examined more closely, as if with “Chase’s Improved Dollar Microscopes” (advertised below) (63). Near the bottom of the page, Harper’s advertises their own magazine as “a complete pictorial history of the times” (63), implying an accurate representation of real events and people. However, images, like people and clues in a detective novel, can be “absolutely deceptive” imitations (63), like Prang’s Chromos, or “do[] justice without mercy,” as Betteredge complains (Collins 50). If "multiple levels of interaction between text and image expand the relational meaning of both" (Anderman 29), how much can an image be trusted if it contains hidden layers?