Lake Trout Print
Lake Trout Print
Size
12 × 12 in overall, unframed. The plate sits on an ivory sheet with a border of about an inch, so it fits a standard ready-made frame of the same size, with or without a mat.
Printed on 189 g/m² (10.3 mil) enhanced matte paper.
Want it ready to hang? The same plate comes framed in Black or Red Oak.
The deep-water trout of the northern lakes, drawn when New York was restocking them by the million.
The print
- The full plate with its name, legend and credits, re-rendered from the source scan at print size, not enlarged from a shirt file.
- Restored from a library scan of the original book; nothing redrawn.
- Keep out of direct sunlight; a frame with glass or acrylic keeps it clean.
Shipping & production
Each print is printed for you after you order, usually within 2–5 business days, and ships on its own (separate from any shirts or framed prints in the same order). Shipping is shown at checkout before you pay.
Returns
If your print arrives damaged or misprinted, contact us within 30 days of delivery with a photo and we'll send a replacement or a refund. Because every print is made to order, we can't accept returns for a change of mind.
Plate 009
From the book
- Species
- Salvelinus namaycush
- As named in the book
- Lake Trout; Salmon Trout.
- Artist
- S. F. Denton
- Book
- Second Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1897
Then and now
Like the brook trout, a char: pale spots on a dark ground.
Field notes
A fish that waits a decade to spawn, and a lake that waited seventy years to get it back.
New York's 1896 fisheries report called it "Lake Trout; Salmon Trout," and Sherman Denton painted it the way it looks coming up from deep water: dark olive-gray, peppered with pale spots, the tail deeply forked. Like the brook trout, it's a char, not a true trout, and it lives where few other fish can, in the cold, deep basins of big northern lakes.
It plays a long game. A lake trout may take eight to ten years to spawn for the first time, and in Lake Superior they commonly live twenty-five or thirty years. That's a strength in a stable lake and a weakness when things change.
Things changed. The sea lamprey, a parasite that feeds on a fish's blood, worked its way into the upper Great Lakes through the shipping canals, and by the late 1950s the lake trout fisheries there had collapsed. Lampricide in the spawning streams and decades of stocking followed, and in 2024 managers declared Lake Superior's lake trout fully restored.
- 1896Denton paints the "Lake Trout; Salmon Trout" for New York.
- 1950sUpper Great Lakes fisheries collapse; lamprey control begins.
- 2024Lake Superior's lake trout declared fully restored.