The following is a guest post by Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division. Among the Library’s treasures is a special collection of Italian chiaroscuro woodcuts made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by such master artists as Domenico Beccafumi, Ugo da Carpi, Bartolomeo Coriolano, and Niccolò Vicentino. Although the chiaroscuro technique …
A column in The Hartford Courant discussing the decline of letter writing in the U.S. blames “this age of quick communication and rapid transportation.” While this is by no means surprising, the date of the newspaper article might be: Oct. 2, 1938! Yes, even 80 years ago, the art of letter writing was seen to …
The following is a guest post by Jan Grenci, Reference Specialist for Posters in the Prints and Photographs Division – as well as a long-suffering Pittsburgh Pirates fan. For almost as long as the game has been played, baseball imagery has been used to advertise a wide variety of products. These items from the Prints …
Spring in Washington, D.C., is marked by changing weather, gardens coming back to life and of course, cherry blossoms. The famous cherry blossom trees surrounding the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial, a gift from Japan more than a century ago, are nearing peak bloom which also means peak volume of visitors to view them! To …
The following is a guest post by Jan Grenci, Reference Specialist for Posters, Prints and Photographs Division. When you take a vacation, do you buy souvenirs to remember the sights you see? Over the past few months, several reference staff members and I worked on a project to improve the access and housing of the …
In the first entry in this occasional series, Profiling Portraits, we examined occupational portraits, a type of portrait designed to tell the viewer a specific fact about the sitter: their occupation. We will now look at another type of portrait, one which is very popular today, thanks to the advent of smartphones with cameras: self-portraits, …
