The exhibition introduced visitors to the importance of the illustrated magazine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and emphasized the primacy of Scribner’s Magazine during the “golden age of illustration.”
Scribner’s art editors hired the best artists and illustrators, and the exhibition featured the works of many of these artists, among them Robert Blum, Charles Dana Gibson, Thornton Oakely, Rose O’Neill, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Frank Schoonover, John H. Twachtman and N.C. Wyeth. Scribner’s also kept pace with technological developments in printing, and the exhibition showed the effects of radical changes in printing techniques that occurred between 1887 and 1912. The earliest illustrations in the magazine were reproduced as wood engravings. By January 1912, the magazine routinely printed four color reproductions.