About:Kurz and Allison

Kurz and Allison were a major publisher of chromolithographs in the late 19th century. Based at 267-269 Wabash Avenue in Chicago, they built their reputation on large prints published in the mid-1880s depicting battles of the American Civil War. This was a period of recollection among veterans, and the company was trying to capitalise of this sentiment. In all, a set of thirty-six battle scenes were published from designs by Louis Kurz (1835–1921), himself a veteran of the war. Kurz, a native of Salzburg, Austria, had emigrated to the United States in 1848. While the prints were highly inaccurate and considered naive fantasies like Currier and Ives prints, they were still sought after. They did not pretend to mirror the actual events but rather attempted to tap people's patriotic emotions.