"Research"

Last year my father and I found three reward of merit certificates for Thomas Morley at an antiques store in Cleveland. My favorite of the three is here, at the top. I used the certificates for an assignment: we had to purchase an item (in this case a related group) for under $75, and argue why a museum should accession it. This certificate was about $5, as were the other two. I didn't know who this little boy was, where or when he lived, or anything else about him. The names of his teachers didn't help either, and it was difficult to search for people when I had no location. I thought maybe they would have been given not too far from Ohio, since we got them there. While researching a Philadelphia topic, I was leafing through a book that contained the print at the bottom, of Beck's shot tower on the Schuylkill. Gee, I thought, this looks familiar! I had randomly found what might have been one of the print sources for my certificate. Looking more into the waterworks in this area, I also found this sketchbook showing a similar view, with those bridges matching pretty convincingly.

Moral of the story? Look at lots of stuff. You never know when research might happen by accident.

NYPL Digital Galleries

While securing sources for my thesis, I discovered the digital galleries of the New York Public Library! They have a large number of sources fully digitized and available for your consumption, including things by George Smith (who I used while writing a furnishing plan), James and Robert Adam, and Thomas King - all big names in my world. This wealth of design sources is unexpected and AWESOME, and I wish I had known about it last year. I cannot get over how cool this is, and I could literally spend hours looking through all of these images of costume, furniture, architecture, and other decorative arts and interiors. And, to top it off, you can buy prints of any page you want (if you could ever choose).