1868 Distilled Spirits Taxpaid And Dakota Check

I've long liked the 1868 series of distilled spirits taxpaid stamps. Below I've posted the 40 gallon example (Springfield 5B). My favorite part of it has to be the vignette. Agricultural scenes on stamps have always been a favorite theme of mine.

A couple years ago, I noticed the same vignette on a check from the Dakota territory and acquired a pair via the good people at ebay. The check vignette is much less crisp than the impression on the 1868 stamp (expectedly, since a couple decades had passed!), but it clearly is the same image.

I've always wondered, how did a private printing firm reuse an image that was used on a Treasury Department tax stamp? Did the Treasury Department at some point give up the rights to that image? And would anyone know the identity of the artist behind this particular vignette?

Any help you guys can offer on this process would be much appreciated. Is this common practice? Are there other examples of images from federal (or state) issues that appear subsequently on material from private presses?

Stock designs were often used by several engravers and printers. They saved a lot of time in production. The Treasury Dept did not do a lot of revenue stamps, they were usually done by contract to private companies who were mostly the usual suspects: Continental Bank Note, National Bank Note and American Bank Note.

Beautiful vignettes on those!

The thresher vignette on the check is lithographed. It was very common for small printing houses to copy the designs of the big bank note firms. Copyrights didn't seem to be as well policed as they are now, and the small printers could argue that the work was different because it was created for a different medium -- lithography rather than engraving.

That's a great taxpaid -- I have one in my own collection.