Prairie Chicken, from the Game Birds series (N40) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes

Art Historical Context

Step into the vibrant world of 19th-century American ephemera with *Prairie Chicken* from Allen & Ginter's Game series (N40), a delightful commercial color lithograph produced between 1888 and 1890. Created by the pioneering tobacco firm Allen & Ginter, this tiny card (just 2 7/8 x 3 1/4 inches) was one of many inserted into cigarette packs to entice collectors and boost sales. Part of a popular set celebrating North American game birds, it captures the prairie chicken—a plump, feathered icon of the Great Plains—in exquisite detail, highlighting its role as a prized game species in an era of expanding railroads and hunting culture. The artwork showcases chromolithography, a revolutionary printing technique that layered vibrant colors through multiple stone plates, mimicking hand-painted realism at mass scale. This innovation made high-quality illustrations affordable and widespread, transforming everyday tobacco products into portable art collections. Allen & Ginter's cards bridged commerce and natural history illustration, fueling a collecting craze that predated modern trading cards like baseball sets. Today, housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Jefferson R. Burdick Collection—a treasure trove of over 30,000 American cards—this piece underscores the cultural fusion of advertising, ornithology, and artistry. It reminds us how even humble cigarette inserts preserved vanishing wildlife imagery amid America's industrial boom.

About the Artist

Allen & Ginter

Allen & Ginter, the pioneering American tobacco firm based in Richmond, Virginia, emerged around 1880 from the partnership of John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter, evolving from Allen's earlier John F. Allen & Company. Allen retired in 1882, succeeded by John Pope, yet the brand endured under Ginter's leadership, employing over 1,100 workers—mostly women—for hand-rolled cigarettes by 1886. Ginter, a Dut...