#lcpimperfecthistory
A scrapbook, in essence, is many times a volume of repurposed works of art. Sometimes the scrapbook itself is repurposed. This one is both.
Homemade paper dolls clipped from periodical fashion plates, handmade wardrobes and dressers, and clothing made from colored tissue paper fill the pages of this 1870s geography textbook. With a pasted label warning, “this book must be covered, not be scribbled upon, kept clean, and paid for if not returned when demanded” during its time as a textbook, it is imperfectly perfect in form and function as a work of “idiosyncratic” art and an historical visual material.
The daguerreotype shown here was the first one purchased for LCP’s Graphic Arts Collection, but why this example of an unidentified man taken by an unknown photographer was worthy of acquisition remains a puzzle.
It was incorrectly identified as a quarter-plate daguerreotype in the Library’s accession book, indicating that at least some of the Graphics Art Department staff was still learning about this type of material.
Portrait of an Unidentified Man, ca. 1850. Ninth-plate daguerreotype.
Philadelphia engineer and architect Frederick Graff worked with architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to design the city’s water works at Centre Square and became their superintendent in 1805. This plan with its many notations made over the span of more than two decades shows how the water works became integrated into the fabric of the lives of the city’s residents.
Unsurprisingly, Graff included information about the length, width, and circumference of various walkways in the square, but we also learn through these additions of the presence of a gambling house and the discovery of a murder victim’s body.
Frederick Graff, [Plan of Centre Square], ca. 1800-1827.
This early salted paper print was commissioned by Charles Poulson as part of a series of 120 cityscape views by Philadelphia painter and photographer Frederick De Bourg Richards (1822-1903) to document the changing architecture of the city.
Richards’ painter’s eye for composition is visible in this perspective view of Carpenters’ Hall, the historical building that housed the Library Company 1773-1790. Richards’ photograph encapsulates the tacit acknowledgement that a city needs to preserve its history but also needs to evolve to remain vital.
Frederick De Bourg Richards, Carpenters’ Court and Hall (in perspective), Chestnut St. bet. Third & Fourth St. May 1859.
The Graphic Arts Collection is home to a large collection of posters from World War I, the provenance of which is largely unknown since most of them are backed with linen. However, this poster provides curators with clues on the collection’s origins.
A manuscript note on the back of the poster, which is not backed by linen, indicates that it was brought by Corinne Keen Freeman in 1919 for display at LCP’s Juniper Street building.
Freeman was the chairperson of the South Philadelphia Women’s Auxiliary Liberty Loan Committee, which worked to get community members signed up for loan subscriptions that helped the U.S. pay for the war effort.
It wasn’t until 1980, however, that our more than 300 WWI posters were formally added into the collection.
Vic Forsythe, And They Thought We Couldn’t Fight, ca. 1919. Poster print.
The designs of popular medicine trade cards for often-dubiously manufactured products were meant to catch the eye with a glance as well as to be looked at repeatedly.
For Dr. Kilmer’s Female Remedy, images of the private and public domains and relationships of women predominate. The visual metaphors show the life to be had by a middle-class Kilmer consumer transformed from the confinement of immobility on a veranda to one of freedom for recreation, travel, and tranquility.
This female empowerment imagery may also have been read as the freedom from motherhood. Advertised as a cure for “suspicious growths,” the rhetoric suggests its possible use as an abortifacient as well.
The Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning Collection contains several 19th- and 20th-century portrait photographs of members of the extended Black families descended from the relationship of Richard Codgell, South Carolina merchant and enslaver, and Sarah Sanders, an enslaved woman in his household. The portraits embody an anti-racist, counter archive to contemporaneous collections of racist imagery and caricatures.
Probably a Black family member or friend took this snapshot in the backyard of the residence of Miranda Cogdell Venning, granddaughter of Sarah Sanders. There is both a formalness and candidness to the sitters’ mannerisms in this image taken at the family home. Miranda, probably the woman seated on the hammock, was the first African American graduate of the Philadelphia Girls High School and Normal School. A school principal, she died of tuberculosis one year after this view was taken. She was thirty-eight years old.
M. C. V., June 1899, Venning’s Yard, [1116 Fitzwater Street]. Cyanotype. Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning Collection.
The acquisition of 151 watercolor views of Philadelphia by Benjamin R. Evans was the first significant acquisition by the Graphic Arts Department.
Commissioned by antiquarian Ferdinand Dreer, Evans created many drawings on site and based others on photographs or earlier artwork. Evans’s views focused on small shops and modest buildings, like Enoch’s Variety Theatre, rather than city landmarks and portrayed a world far neater and homogeneous than the actual city.
Benjamin Ridgway Evans, East Side of Seventh Below Arch, 1883. Watercolor. Purchase 1975.
One of the first American popular graphics art work purchased for the Print Department, this print purports to be an accurate depiction of George Washington’s final hours and was published shortly after his December 1799 death.
Martha Washington watches from the foot of the bed while two physicians attend to the former president. The artist, however, made the decision to not include any of the enslaved people in the Washington household whose presence at the deathbed was recorded in contemporary written descriptions and other later 19th-century visual depictions of the scene.
