The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. When the elegant Hispanic Reading Room opened in October 1939, its closest neighbor at the Library of Congress was the Division of Fine Arts, known today as the Prints & Photographs Division. Over the last 75 years, we have enjoyed collaborating …
The following is a guest post by Sara W. Duke, Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Arts, Prints & Photographs Division. The Library of Congress has long collected cartoon art and illustration, including editorial cartoon and comic strip drawings. In the last fifteen years, we’ve expanded the scope to include original drawings for alternative comics, …
The following is a guest post by Woody Woodis, Cataloger, Prints and Photographs Division Today, in honor of Bastille Day, or La Fête Nationale, marking the beginning of the French Revolution, we feature highlights from the French Political Cartoon Collection. This small but exemplary collection of 365 prints spans almost two centuries and touches on …
School may be out for the summer, but around the Library of Congress there’s always something new to learn. This week I joined teachers attending one of the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute sessions to display examples of primary sources that might be suited to classroom exercises. It set me to reflecting on examples …
George Washington delivered the country’s first inaugural address 225 years ago on April 30th, 1789. Just as the legends pertaining to Washington have grown and persisted since his lifetime, so has the iconography. Throughout the years, artists have provided their own conceptions of the first presidential inauguration, as in this print published in 1849, which …
Tomorrow many households in the U.S. will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday. Holidays–particularly food-centered ones–conjure up many personal associations. They also tend to inspire evocative pictures. Turkey in many shapes and forms predominate in the array of images that turn up when you search the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog for “Thanksgiving.” But my family …
As we near Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday on Oct. 27th, we have ongoing cause for celebration. A project to broaden access to images relating to Roosevelt’s life and times is putting new digital images and descriptions online each week. Last year, the project brought us illustrations from Puck magazine, including this visual jab at Roosevelt’s positive …
Reference staff member Elizabeth Terry Rose, exercising both her keen eye and her artistic sensibility, offered her reflections upon seeing this photo by Samuel Kravitt highlighting Shaker design. “Sewing table and chair caught my eye for its timeless tidiness, its dignified peace, its light. It is a Kravitt. It is a Wyeth, a Vermeer. An invitation.” …
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. What tends to be 3.5 inches tall and 10 inches long? Postcards created in a panoramic view format. More than 400 oversize postcards are “new for you” in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. The Library received most of the postcards …