Nineteenth-century Art Research Articles

Julia Margaret Cameron: the complete photographs

According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron's great-nieces, We never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did any one else. This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815-1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than a thousand images over the next fourteen years. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her art through exhibitions and sales, and pursuing the eminent men of her time (Tennyson, Herschel, Carlyle, etc.) as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonne. In addition to a complete catalogue of Cameron's photographs, the book contains information on her photographic experiments and techniques, artistic approach, small-format photographs, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of inspiration. Also provided is a selected bibliography of all major Cameron publications, a list of exhibitions of her work, and a summary of important Cameron collections worldwide. This catalogue is published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of Cameron's photographs that opens in England in spring 2003 and will be on view at the Getty Museum in autumn 2003.

Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (review)

The Parisian prostitute in her many guises - grisette, lorette, courtisane, demi-mondaine - is a well-recognized fixture in nineteenth-century French literature. From the physiologies of the 1830s and '40s, to Hugo's Marion de Lorme, Balzac's Les Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Maupassant's La Dame aux camélias, Maupassant's La Maison Tellier, the Goncourts' La Fille Elisa and Zola's Nana, the prostitute took her place in the French cultural consciousness in a form almost entirely mediated through the imaginations of male writers and painters (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gervex, Degas). In her incarnations on the page and the stage, on canvas and in the popular press in caricature and illustration, she became a potent symbol for a multitude of contemporary (male) anxieties: the dangers of trans-gressing the hierarchies of gender and class; the threat of female sexuality; the power of the working woman; the mystifying forces of capital and capitalism; and the ambiguous role of the nineteenth-century artist himself shilling his work in the bourgeois marketplace, to name but a few.

A BRUSH WITH NATURE: AN HISTORICAL AND TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PAPERS AND BOARDS USED AS SUPPORTS FOR LANDSCAPE OIL SKETCHING

From the early eighteenth century onwards, artists began to use both papers and boards for oil sketching out of doors. This artist-led innovation relied on various wrapping papers, laminated papers, millboards, pasteboards and pasteless boards, all of which were designed and made for purposes other than oil sketching. By the early years of the nineteenth century artists’ colourmen were advertising ‘papers and boards for oil sketching’, but most of these were still actually designed and produced for other purposes, merely chosen by artists for their strength or texture or other appropriate qualities. By the mid nineteenth century, however, under pressure from artists’ colourmen intent on supplying the now flourishing amateur market, various paper and board mills in Britain and and the rest of Europe were producing papers and boards specifically designed for use with oil paints. This paper surveys the developments in both artistic practice and the manufacture of the papers and boards available to artists, through the examination of works by various artists including Thomas Jones, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.

SERPENTINE RIVERS AND SERPENTINE THOUGHT: FLUX AND MOVEMENT IN WALTER PATER’S LEONARDO ESSAY

ON AUGUST 21, 1911 THE MONA LISA was stolen from the Louvre, not to reappear again until well over two years later when the thief tried to sell the work to a Florentine art dealer. The patriotic Italian workman who had stolen the painting had wanted to bring some of the Italian masterpieces in French collections back to where they belonged, and he had commenced his grand project with the Mona Lisa because, as he explained, “mi sembrava la piú bella” — she seemed to him to be the most beautiful of them all.1 For Bernard Berenson the disappearance of the Mona Lisa brought about a major rebellion against the ideals he had cultivated as a young man. In his early books on the Florentine painters and their drawings he had sung the praises of Leonardo,2 and ever since he was a student at Harvard in the early 1880s he had been a professed devotee of the writings and thought of Walter Pater.3 Pater’s most celebrated prose passage — his evocation of the Mona Lisa — was one of the pieces of nineteenth-century art criticism which had influenced Berenson more than anything else.4 Like so many other people of his generation, he had learnt the text by heart, and his first visits to the Louvre appear to have been as much in honor of Walter Pater as of the Italian masters.

The materials used by British oil painters throughout the nineteenth century

The published literature on the analysis of nineteenth-century British artists' materials for oil painting is reviewed. Painting media other than oil, and literature covering artists who worked before 1800 and after 1900, have not been included. Recent monographs that cover and interpret earlier published work have been cited where possible, in preference to the citation of all the earlier work by the same author. Sources of information, such as colourmen's archives, artists' diaries and surviving palettes, are discussed; and gaps in knowledge, as well as published information, are highlighted. The literature available on individual materials is summarised: supports and primings; pigments; paint, mediums and vehicles; adulterants; varnishing practices; and framing practices. Publications which deal with the materials used by individual artists are listed, and those which attempt to synthesise the information in terms of the preferences and choices made by an artist over a lifetime, by a group of artists, or during a particular period, are discussed. For the later nineteenth century, there is far more published information on non-British artists. This information is still relevant to the study of British art, since artists' materials would have been exported by then round Western countries, and even beyond. Significant publications in this area are cited.

Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937, and the Museum of Modern Art

Critics have regarded Beaumont Newhall's tenure as the MoMA's curator of photography in the late 1930s as the first manifestation in the Photography Department of a larger problem at the MoMA as a whole: the attempt to define by fiat a ‘modernist aesthetic’ in photography as it had in the other arts. Newhall's first large-scale exhibition, however, belies this interpretation. Photography: 1839–1937, used a wide range of images and innovative display strategies to illustrate the entire domain of photography (X-rays to movie stills) rather than define or promote a high art separate from the popular origins of the medium. This inclusiveness, I argue, was based on the theories of Alois Riegl, a late nineteenth century art theorist who eschewed value distinctions between so-called high and low art. By applying Riegl's theories to this seminal exhibition, Newhall re-defined the role of the modern curator to that of an archivist: one who gathers, but leaves the creation of meaning to the viewer.

Seurat: drawings and paintings

Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had a meteoric career that ended in 1891 with his death at age 31. In this generously illustrated book, the leading specialist on Seurat examines the entire range of the artist's work, focusing on individual paintings and drawings and interpreting the personal and social meanings of their subjects. Robert L. Herbert examines closely Seurat's early oil panels of rural and suburban settings, early drawings of Parisians at work and leisure, and later canvases and drawings of cafe-concerts and circuses. Showing that Seurat's work drew on classical tradition as well as on popular arts, Herbert reevaluates the artist's painting technique and argues that individual pictures reveal artistic craft and trial and error rather than a 'scientific' nature. And he demonstrates that although Seurat's drawings and paintings have striking formal structures, they are not 'abstract', but rather poetic distillations of social and psychological meanings. This collection of the most influential of Herbert's writings on Seurat, long out of print, bear out the praise he has received for 'his ability to mix a deep knowledge of paintings and drawings as physical objects with an acute awareness of the way they embody ideas and can be understood as social documents' (Jack Flam, New York Review of Books). This attractive book will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of French nineteenth-century art.

The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema by Richard s> Taylor Nancy Wood , Julian Graffy , Dina Iordanova (review)

REVIEWS 739 research, the publishers were presumably unsure of the extent of its appeal. This is a pity since without sacrificing an intellectual probity which should appeal to the specialist in the field, this is an articulate and 'user-friendly' volume which should speak also to students of Russian culture in its broadest, multidisciplinary sense, and to an intelligent general readership as well. Hopefully this may prove the catalyst to more publications in the field of Russian nineteenth-century art. Department ofFineArt,Histoy ofArt,andCultural Studies D. JACKSON University ofLeeds Taylor, Richard; Wood, Nancy; Graffy,Julian; Jordanova, Dina (eds). 7he BFI Companion toEastern European andRussianCinema. British FilmInstitute Publishing,London, 2000. Vii + 288pp. Illustrations.Bibliography. /45.00; kI4.99. THE BFI COMPANION TO EASTERN EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN CINEMA is an ambitiousand attractivebook which shouldprove usefulto both professionals and enthusiasts. The opening introductions to Eastern European cinema by Nancy Wood and Dina lordanova, and to Russian cinema by Julian Graffy are excellent starting points for students new to the field. Other longer general entries such as those on film studiosor film festivalsin Eastern Europe, for example, or on the Soviet Union are also of particular help to non-specialists.The book is clearly laid out, it has a good basic bibliography and contains some powerfulimages (worthincludingdespitethe unimpressive quality of the reproductions).The content is informative, wide-ranging and very readable, making it a rewarding book to browse through as well as a useful reference guide. In terms of the latter, it is a welcome inclusion to provide website addresseswhere possible, as in the case of Polishdirectorand scriptwriterAgnieszkaHolland. As I hope is clear by now, my response to this (the only?)BFI Companion is, on the whole, positive. Some entries are elegantly written and densely packed with information which gives more than just an outline of a career, such as the ones on Sergei Makovetsky and on Mikl6s Jancs6; others are stylisticallyclumsieror scantierin content or both. Such unevenness is almost inevitable in an edited volume with twelve contributorsand so many entries, and is not a serious problem. It is a pity, however, that greater care was not taken with the editing and/or proof-readingof the manuscript.Diacritics are often absent in one occurrence of a name and present in the next, or vice versa.Unless thereis some strangesystemat workhere, such as the temporary adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet's letter order, surely the entry on 'Dravi' (p. 64) should follow the one on 'Dragojevic'(p. 65) and not precede it? Can 'Pleiad'reallybe spelt 'pleyade'in English(p. I76)? Of course the above criticismsare minor, but there is also a more serious one to make. In the entryon FAMU,the famousPraguefilmschool, it is stated that 'some of the best-known graduates have included AleksandarPetrovi' (p. 72); when one follows the asteriskedreference through to the director's entry it failsto discusshis training,recordingonly that he was 'removed'from 740 SEER, 79, 4, 200I the Belgrade Film Academy (p. I8o). Once one such inconsistency has been discovered, the reader begins to wonder which others might have slipped through unnoticed, and this undermines the book as a whole. Nonetheless, TheBFI Companion toEastern European andRussianCinema is a worthwhile book to own and should certainlybe held in any librarydealing with Russian and East European culture, as well as in film studies libraries.It is an unenviable task to compile such a volume and the editors are to be thanked, despite the few oversightsI have unkindlyhighlighted. London MILENA MICHALSKI Chudo, Alicia. And QuietFlowstheVodka, or WhenPushkinComes to Shove.The Curmudgeon's Guide toRussian Literature andCulture, withTheDevil'sDictionary ofReceived Ideas.Alphabetical Reflections ontheLoathsomeness ofRussia, American Academiaand Humanityin General.Edited by Andrew Sobesednikov. Northwestern University Press,Evanston, IL, 2000. Viii + 249 PP. Illustrations .Appendices. $14.95: ?I 2.95. HUMOUR is, of course,knownforitsindividualappeal orlackof it. Fewreaders of this eclectic compendium, however, will fail to be amused, at least, from time to time by the cornucopia of reflections, commentaries, pictures and poems offeredfrom what for this reviewerwas a very unexpected source. On the other hand perhaps only such an impressivescholaras Gary Saul Morson could allow himselfnot one pseudonym, but two. The first part of the book comprises a chronological review of...

Iconology of the interval: Aby Warburg's legacy

It has long been recognized that Aby Warburg played a central role, perhaps even he central role, in elevating the role of iconology in Art History. Having been traditionally regarded as an ancillary activity, iconological interpretation came to displace the concern with aesthetic form and style predominant in late nineteenth-century art historical discourse.1 Through the work of collaborators, students and followers such as Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich, iconology became, from the 1930S onwards, established as a canonical method in art historical interpretation. Although semiological, psychoanalytical and culturalmaterialist interpretations have subsequently dislodged iconology from its central place in the practice of Art History, iconology still maintains prominence in much contemporary scholarship.2 Indeed, while iconological methods are often regarded as the culmination of the bourgeois tradition of scholarship in Art History, it has also been argued that iconology, especially as formulated by Warburg's student Panofsky, in many ways anticipated subsequent theoretical positions, in particular, the semiological analysis of images.3 However, although the idea of the iconological ‘method’ is common currency, its origins in the writings of Warburg have become largely obscured. The reasons for this are quite clear. Until the recent translation of The Renewal if Pagan Antiquity, most of Warburg's work has remained inaccessible to anglophone readers, and those few other writings already translated lie scattered across a variety of different publications.4 Furthermore, the bulk of his work remains unpublished even in German: the texts gathered together for the publication, in 1932, of Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike, the first two volumes of a projected six-volume edition of Warburg's work, constitute only a small proportion of his total output.5 Consequently Warburg's work, though acknowledged as ground-breaking, has tended to be eclipsed by the more voluminous writings of Panofsky, Wittkower and others.

Cooking with Mud : The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (review)

The only strange feature of this admirable book is its title. Baudelaire, the writer who pre-eminently characterized the creation of art in terms of the culinary and the cos-metic, described the metamorphosis of raw reality into crafted artefact, as the transformation of mud into gold, in a way which the anecdote from the childhood of Mary Butts, cited by David Trotter, barely encompasses. The sub-title of the book gives a far clearer picture of its range and content: the poetics and politics of "mess-theory" in Western fiction and painting, from approximately 1860 to 1900. "Mess" is to be understood in Samuel Beckett's use of the term, in his 1961 interview with Tom Driver, when he spoke of seeking in art "a form that accommodates the mess." Beckett, however, equated this activity with "chaos," whereas Trotter, in his book, [End Page 179] differentiates between the two. More precisely, Trotter makes a distinction between a theory of "waste" and a theory of "mess" (17). "Waste" is an effect which can be traced back to its cause and, ultimately, to human agency: it can be recycled and can be linked to renewal. Philosophically, in terms of order and disorder, it is related to determinism. By contrast, "mess" is governed by chance. It can be "good," in that it may mark the beginning of an illusion (as in desire), or "bad," in that it may mark the shattering of an illusion. It may be creative, as in the clutter of the studios of Edgar Degas or Francis Bacon, who each, in their different ways, produced some of their finest works in an environment of extreme "messiness." Philosophically, it is linked to the concept of contingency and is, aesthetically, the harbinger of modernism.

Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art

In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable.The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era?Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

Magic and illusion in early cinema

This essay looks at the influence of nineteenth-century magic arts on early film-makers, looking particularly at Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. I hope to show that the origins of cinematic illusion lie in an earlier art form which fused science and showmanship. The historical links between magic and cinema can help us to understand early film's ambiguous relations to both art and technology. Since magic theatre was designed to remove any fearful elements from the stagecraft, the illusions took on an anti-realistic quality which would enable spectators to appreciate the artistry and the science behind a trick without ever being completely deceived. Some of the earliest film-makers engaged with both the scientific and artistic capabilities of the new medium in order to meet the expectations of such technically-literate audiences.

Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts Permanent Collection (review)

Histories of Victorian art have traditionally allotted the Royal Academy a significant, but largely malign, role. It was, Julian Treuherz confirms in Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, "the focal point of the Victorian art world, but it discouraged innovation, and the most advanced artists never became members" (12). This view replicates that dominant, if tired, Paris-based master narrative which structures the history of nineteenth-century art through a Manichean dualism between Salon exhibitions glorifying smug and degenerate "pompiers," and the innovative work of the avant-garde heroes of realism, impressionism, and modernism. The histories of British, German, and American art have largely been written in accordance with this paradigm, by which the "RA" is habitually stigmatised as a bastion of English conservatism and provincialism, steadily painting itself into a reactionary corner. The progression of a painter such as John Everett Millais from Pre-Raphaelite rebel to President of the Royal Academy--PRB to PRA--is accounted as a collapse in moral as well as aesthetic standards. The dominance of the RA and the absence of a coherent avant-garde (James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and even William Holman Hunt have been auditioned for the leading role) accounts for the "failure" of Victorian painting. A revisionist trend in recent scholarship has questioned this orthodoxy and attempted to reclaim some members of the Academy for reconsideration as more complex and significant artists than had hitherto been acknowledged (see, for [End Page 495] example, Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn, eds., Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity [1999] and Paul Barlow, "Millais, Manet, Modernity" in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, eds., English Art 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity [2000]).

Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The study of institutions as significant agents in the nineteenth-century art world has come late to art history. Thus Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century is a welcome and timely contribution to the field. Colin Trodd and Rafael Cardoso Denis offer a volume marked by a "commitment to identifying academic discourse as a process of renewal and challenge" (5) in which the contributors variously explore "the complex web of relations at work in the institutions, histories and pictorial registrations of academic culture" (8). This volume does not so much dispute current interpretations of academicism as claim a wholly new intellectual space for its study. It is a tall order, yet the authors pull it off. This superbly edited volume is theoretical and empirically dense, yet each chapter is readable and accessible.

Ingres in Reproduction

One aspect of the historiography of nineteenth‐century art has been the virtual exclusion from serious attention of the reproductive engravings that played such an important role in establishing the reputations of the painters of the period. Benjamin's well‐known essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has led to a disproportionate emphasis on the importance of lithography and photography as harbingers of a new age, and perhaps incidentally helped to exclude from consideration those photographers specializing in the reproduction of paintings, who could be considered to be in direct rivalry with the engravers. The significant investment which Ingres had in the reproduction of his works becomes much clearer when we look closely at his long and friendly relationship with the Italian engraver Luigi Calamatta. This article uses published and unpublished material relating to Calamatta and other engravers to clarify the point that Ingres was continually preoccupied with the need to have his work engraved, but unable to ensure the results that he desired – partly because each new print offered the possibility of amending a previous composition, and partly because he did not succeed in establishing a strong relationship with a dealer such as Goupil. Ingres's relation to lithography is also considered, in relation to his own practice and that of the lithographer Sudre, who reproduced some of his works. Finally, the contribution of contemporary photographers to the reproduction of Ingres's work is summarised, with special emphasis on his mixed experiences with the most acclaimed reproduction photographer of the day, the Englishman Robert Jefferson Bingham.

"Ces Dames du Cirque": A Taxonomy of Male Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Art

The career of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) encapsulates the multifaceted thematics of desire, domination, display and creativity which nineteenth-century art and literature played out through the persona of the female circus performer. Suzanne is best known as the openfaced, golden-haired jolie mome in Renoir's Danse a la campagne, Danse a la ville (both from 1883) and Les Baigneuses (1887). Her unreliable memoirs have her as femme-serpent in a travelling circus and/or acrobate-ecuyere at Paris's prestigious amateur circus, the Cirque Molier. More likely is that she was a figurante and apprentice acrobat at her local Cirque Fernando, in Montmartre. In the event, her career as circus artiste was ended by an accident, and she became a popular artists' model, posing for both impressionistes and pompiers. Responding to the needs and fantasies of her various masters, she was a melancholy nymph for Herrer, a Muse for Puvis de Chavannes, Degas's dancing girl, a sullen absinthe-drinker, and the model for Toulouse-Lautrec's bareback rider in Au Cirque Fernando: Ecuyere (1888).' Although it is the exaggerated massiveness of the horse's

Pheidias and 'l'esprit moderne' : The Study of Human Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century English and French Art Education

This article considers the transformation of artists' education during the nineteenth century, from neo-classical idealism to classical naturalism. Through a study of manuals of anatomical education used in the Royal Academy and the École des Beaux-Arts, it shows that this change was the result of the massive importation into Western Europe of specimens of fifth-century B.C. Greek art, and, most notably, of specimens of the work of Pheidias and Polycletus. European contact with Pheidian anatomical naturalism acted as a catalyst for the introduction into art of the modern spirit of science thereby making figural art modern.

Kurt Weill as Modernist

What is modernism? To me, there are two chief features. First, a tendency to extremes, a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction--if nineteenth-century art often seeks a safe center where the artist and the audience can be comfortable together, modernist art often seeks the freakish peripheries of the artistic experience, regions of discomfort and confrontation. Jean Cocteau liked to say that tact in audacity was knowing how far to go too far; but much modernist art consists of tactless aggression, aggressive overload of the sense organs, aggressive transgression of taboos, aggressive density of event, aggressive technicality, aggressive monotony, aggressive matter-of-factness, even (in the case of Satie) aggressive reticence. 1 Second, a certain sense of dwelling inside paradox, since aesthetic extremes tend to converge: when T. S. Eliot, in 1921, first heard Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, he wrote that the music seemed to "transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric noises of modern life." 2 In other words, the most up-to-date factory noises were audible within an evocation of pagan Russia: the australopithecine and the man with the jackhammer inhabit exactly the same acoustic space, make the same sort of cry. Twentieth-century music is full of convergences of opposites: the line between excessively expressive and excessively sachlich music can be thin; it is even true that music generated by purely random procedures can sound similar to music generated by the most rigorous precompositional system. The aged Stravinsky complained that "What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive [End Page 273] fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance." 3 And if the distinction between chaos and cosmos is hard to make out, what hope is there for keeping other artistic polarities separate?

William and Henry Walters, the reticent collectors

In the mid-nineteenth century, Baltimore businessman William Thompson Walters began to patronize the artists of Maryland. Today, the museum that bears his name-Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery-excels in fields as diverse as Egyptian bronzes, Byzantine silver, illuminated manuscripts, medieval carved ivories, early Renaissance paintings, Sevres porcelains, Islamic metalwork, and Chinese ceramics. Surprisingly, the story of how William Walters and his son Henry created one of the finest privately assembled museums in the United States has not been told. With this new book, William Johnston, the Walters's curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, restores William and Henry Walters to their rightful place among America's great art collectors. Drawing upon the knowledge of the early museum staff and gathering valuable information from the few other available sources, Johnston has painstakingly recreated the life and world of the Walterses. Though Henry Walters moved easily in Baltimore and New York social circles, Johnston explains, he kept much to himself and generally purchased art away from the public's eye. Despite the Walterses' reticence, they had a significant influence on the development of American tastes and museums-William in his role as the first chairman of the Committee on Works of Art for the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Henry as the second vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their personal collection differs from those of other, more familiar collectors, such as J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, in that Henry Walters intended from the very first that the collection form a museum to serve the public. When the museum first opened its doors in 1934, Johnston relates, many visitors were surprised by the collection's size and by its comprehensive representation of the history of art from the third millennium b.c. to the early twentieth century. Richly illustrated with black-and-white photographs and sixteen pages of full color, this book will fascinate anyone interested in Baltimore history, the history of museums and art collecting in America, and the art and culture of nineteenth-century America.

Local photographers in the national collection

Among the national and international photographers represented in the National Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection (PHC), some 100 were based in Washington, DC. Most of them worked in their own studios, producing portraits or stereographs, such as nineteenth-century artists Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O' Sullivan, and stereo publishers John F. Jarvis and the Washington office of Underwood & Underwood. Later portrait studios included Rice Brothers and Harris and Ewing. A few Washington photographers in the PHC, such as John K. Hillers, worked for the United States government; some specialized in scientific or technical illustration, and many participated in camera clubs. African-American Addison Scurlock and his sons and early motion picture innovator C. Francis Jenkins are featured elsewhere in this issue. The record left by Washington photographers is indicative of a steadily inventive and productive community. Brief descriptions follow for representative examples covering a century and a half: Titian Ramsey Peale, William H. Towles, Bruce McKaig, and Fred J. Maroon.