Wildfire Prevention

While we’re feeling the heat as truly summer-like temperatures in the 90s are making themselves known, the risk of wildfire increases throughout the country.

At the time this was written, 24 wildfires were burning throughout the country.  Maps put out by the National Interagency Fire Center (like this one) show the location of “large incidents,” or large uncontrollable fires that were currently burning at the time of map-making.  Other maps (like this one) can help you determine the likelihood of a wildfire starting in your area.

As a wise bear has said, we all have the power to prevent wildfires and forest fires.  Here at Special Collections, anyone looking through our poster collection will find several 1940s-era posters reminding us of this fact.

A somewhat menacing-looking Smokey reminds us to take care.

 

Smokey Bear, the bear who has such confidence in us humans to prevent forest fires, is the longest running PSA campaign in United States history.  In 1950, a bear cub was orphaned by a forest fire in New Mexico.  Rangers rescued him from the fire and nursed him back to health until he eventually left for a zoo in Washington, D.C. where he became the living symbol for the Smokey Bear fire prevention campaign that is still popular today.

As the poster to the left suggests, the importance of preventing wildfires was felt very strongly in the forties, due to the war-effort.  In fact, the first half of that decade was when this awareness/prevention campaign really started to spread like wildfire (pun intended).  Large, uncontained fires would take attention and supplies away from the troops that were in need of them, making forest fires not only a danger to those near them, but also to those overseas.  Luckily for all of us, there are several easy steps to take to prevent uncontained fires conveniently recorded on this poster, such as making sure your campfire has been put out thoroughly before breaking camp.

In addition to putting forth practical reasons for being careful with fire, the forestry service around this time also tugged at the heartstrings of Americans by issuing posters with Bambi and friends, imploring those that look upon them to not burn down their homes.  As the Disney movie had just debuted the previous year, this poster would have been particularly effective in its message of reminding people of the devastating effects fires have on forest wildlife.

So remember:

  • “only you can prevent wildfires”
  • to see these posters (and others) all you need to do is visit us at Special Collections!

Baby, It’s Hot Outside

The dog days of summer are finally upon us after a long and snowy winter.   As the mercury rises, we all begin to hear (and ask) that famous age-old, sarcastic question:  “Can it possibly get any hotter?”  Special Collections is here to forever lay that question to rest by providing the answer.

Yes.  Much hotter.

One hundred years ago today, on July 10, 1913, the hottest temperature ever was recorded, right here in the USA.  The appropriately named Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley, California reported a sizzling 134 °F (56.7 °C).  According to the National Park Service, summer temperatures in Death Valley average 120 °F throughout the day, before dropping into the nineties at night.

Washington Post, Feb. 13, 1916

A century-old Washington Post headline shows off the new world record.

Swing on in to Special Collections to escape our own summer heat wave.  Access to any of our books, microfilms or comics (along with our air conditioning) is, of course, free of charge.

home Events and Exhibits, Special Collections and Archives New Exhibit! Terrific Tales: From Fairies to Fables

New Exhibit! Terrific Tales: From Fairies to Fables

 

“Terrific Tales: From Fairies to Fables” on exhibit in the Library Colonnade.  The exhibit is brought to you by Special Collections and will be on display July 1st –  August 15th.

July 4, 1813

An address delivered before the Washington Benevolent Society (title page)Happy Independence Day!  While we celebrate with fireworks, picnics, and other festivities, nineteenth-century Americans often attended public speeches by popular religious and political figures.  The Fourth of July Orations Collection, made up of over 450 sermons and addresses, documents the issues that mattered to the American people from 1791 to 1925, and allows us to recapture some of the spirit of Independence Days Past.

On Independence Day* 200 years ago, the United States was 13 months into the War of 1812, and the outlook wasn’t good.  The American military, cobbled together from state militias and lacking professional leadership, lost battle after battle to smaller but better trained and equipped British forces.  By the end of the summer of 1813, the Americans would be forced to flee in disarray from the advancing British.  Public sentiment had never been in favor of the war (as we saw in last year’s Independence Day address); heavy losses and the looming possibility of defeat made the war even less popular, especially in New England.

This year’s featured speech comes to us from Abiel Holmes, a clergyman and author from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is perhaps best known to us today as the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the author) and the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (the Supreme Court justice).

Page 21Holmes presented his speech before the Washington Benevolent Society in Washington, D.C.  As was common in his time, the first half of the speech is a lengthy panegyric on the virtues George Washington.  However, midway through the address, Holmes changes direction.  He condemns the current war and calls for a return to Washingtonian values, principles and policies, particularly that of neutrality.

That most wars are unnecessary, and therefore unjustifiable, the history of the world plainly shows us. … Republics, no less than despotic governments, have been addicted to war, from the lust of gain, a passion for glory, or some unhallowed motives, equally hostile to their prosperity, and dangerous to their liberties. (21)

Holmes goes on to draw a parallel between warlike Sparta and the United States, suggesting that the new republic would be pulled apart by foreign and civil conflict.  He adds, “Whether he [Washington] would ever have sacrificed our peace, or hazarded our liberties, from any considerations, not far more imperious than those alleged as the grounds of the present war, you may conclude, with moral certainty, from his avowed principles, and his pacific administration” (22).

You can read more of Holmes’ speech online.  The entire Fourth of July Orations Collection is available at the University of Missouri Digital Library, and also in traditional format in the Special Collections Reading Room

*July 4, 1813, was a Sunday.  To avoid conflict with religious observances, Independence Day festivities in many communities were moved to July 5, the following Monday.

Kipling and his Collector

A few months ago we received a generous gift of 191 books, mainly first, sometimes first American, editions of Rudyard Kipling, works about him, and a few books with beautiful fore-edge paintings.

Helen Jenkins

Mrs. Helen Jenkins, the donor of the collection, has recently passed away, a few days shy of her 100th birthday. Born in Topeka, in 1913 in the family of the first licensed pharmacist in Kansas, Helen Katherine Gibler Montgomery Jenkins lived a long and a very happy life. She graduated from the University of Missouri in 1935 with a B.A. in journalism and became a professional reporter. With her husband being in the military, she had to move from place to place quite often. At forty-two, she took a job at a public library and having quickly discovered that she loved it much more than journalism, she enrolled in a master’s program in library science and received her librarian’s degree in 1961 from Rutgers University. She went on to become director of the New Jersey Fanwood Library, held offices in the New Jersey Library Association, and edited the monthly newsletter for the Association and the Library School’s alumni magazine. But her true passion was Kipling. This is how she discovered him.

My husband's great aunt was Flora V. Livingston. She was the librarian in charge of the rare book room at Harvard’s Widener Library for something like 35 years, from about 1910 to the 40s. Her specialty was Kipling and she spent years compiling a bibliography of his work. …To do this, Aunt Flora traveled to England and India and picked up many, many first editions. The best volumes went, of course, to Harvard; the second best she kept for herself. When she died in the late 1940s, she left her books to Paul and me. The boxes sat in our basement for several weeks and finally, one evening, after a cocktail or two, we decided to get down to opening the boxes. Anyway, after I did learn a little about what we had, I began to buy and to add to the really good stuff …”

Kipling Portrait youngRudyard Kipling took a firm hold on her imagination. In her lecture on Kipling she talks about him with a note of personal compassion, especially when she speaks of his lonely childhood:

Kipling’s grandparents, on both sides, were Methodist ministers. His mother, Alice, was one of the five clever and beautiful Macdonald sisters. Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and a teacher, something of an eccentric. He met Alice Macdonald at a picnic. When, at the age of 28, he received a good appointment to head the School of Art in Bombay, he married Alice on March 18, 1865, and they moved to India. Rudyard, sentimentally named for the lake where his parents met, was born on December 30 of the same year.

This was Victorian England and Colonial India. Children of the upper classes were customarily turned over to servants. They saw their parents mainly when Daddy was dressed in his regimental finery and Mother was in an evening gown. Indian servants were trained to accede to any demand from their young charges, with the result, at least in the case of Ruddy (his in-family nickname) of a definitely spoiled child. It is reported that he was talkative and untidy, incessantly asking questions and expressing his opinions without hesitation.

Her next passage, about his early years, reminds one of some heart-wrenching pages from Dickens.

Kipling BoyWhen he was six years old, Ruddy’s parents packed him and his three-year-old sister, Beatrice, off to England to escape the cholera and the heat of India and to be educated. For reasons never known, the children were left to board in the house of a woman whose name the parents got from an ad in the newspaper, rather than with their English relatives. (Maybe they didn’t want difficult Ruddy.) The parents slipped away secretly – the children had not been warned that they were being left – and it was five years before they saw their parents again. Kipling was mistreated, unfairly punished, told he was bad – and for some minor prevarication, sent off to school for several days wearing on his back a sign that said “LIAR”.

“After five years in what he later referred to as the “House of Desolation”, Kipling was sent to an army cram school in Devon for the sons of not-so-well off officers. He was smallish, non-athletic, with dark beetling eyebrows. His thick pebble glasses kept him from any career in the army. But he was tough, funny and clever. He read voraciously and made his mark as school wit and versifier and star writer for the school paper. These school experiences are immortalized in Stalky & Company. Of the characters, “Beetle,” is the young Ruddy.

In 1882, not yet 17, Ruddy went back to India, to Lahore, to become 50% of the staff of the Civil & Military Stalky & Company Gazette, a frontier daily newspaper. He worked 10 to 15 hours a day under the heat and hellish conditions that he describes at the start of The Man Who Would Be King. He was plagued with sleeplessness all his life and to escape this, he wrote much of what would become his first book to be published for general readership, Departmental Ditties

Departmental ditties 2

Departmental Ditties was an immediate success and was reprinted several times. Mrs. Jenkins had copies of the first and six following editions, English and American. Kipling moved to Allahabad and became a full time reporter in a newspaper. Later he sold all his stories and poems to a company that sold them in cheap paperbacks at railway stations in India. Mrs. Jenkins proudly notes that she has all of them in her collection.

Kipling then returns to London. In less than two years he becomes a celebrity. It didn’t spare him from personal misfortunes, which eventually led him to something like a nervous breakdown. In 1890 Kipling quits London and goes on a sea voyage. He befriended young Americans, Wolcott Balestier and his sister Caroline, who in less than a year becomes his wife.

Kipling by Philip Burne Jones, 1899

Newlywed Kiplings settle in America, in Vermont where his wife’s parents lived. There he wrote the First and the Second of his Jungle Books.

Helen Jenkins: “Kipling was not completely happy in the United States. He made tactless comments to the press and consequently, got a bad press. To complicate things, his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, got into a smoldering argument with him over the use of some land and in a fit of rage, threatened to kill Kipling. A foolish lawsuit against Beatty, which Kipling won, gave the American papers a field day. In 1896, disgusted with this, the Kiplings packed up and went back to England. They came back to the States three years later and Rudyard became seriously ill with pneumonia. He finally recovered, but during his illness, his daughter, Josephine, 7 years old, died of the same illness. Kipling lived for 37 more years, but he never set foot in the United States again.”

Already by his thirties quite famous and well-to-do, he received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, thus becoming the first Englishman to get it. However, his life could not escape thorns and scorn. He lost his son in the first World War and could never quite recover from this tragedy. His relations with his wife deteriorated. Some well-known citations from his writings reflect his disenchantment: “The female of the species is more deadly than the male (The Female of the Species); “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” (The Betrothed); “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels the fastest who travels alone” (The Winners).

Kiplings in the car

Posterity has not been entirely kind to Carrie Kipling, who was described by some as self-pitying, bossy and possessive. One modern writer even called her “one of the most loathed women of her generation”; * but Henry James, who knew her personally, wrote about “passionate Carrie, remarkable in her force, acuteness, capacity and courage.” Their marriage lasted for more than forty years, she bore him his three much loved children; her practicality shielded him from the humdrum of daily life and allowed him to write. Most likely, without her there would have been no Kipling we know.

fore-edge 2

With time, his popularity began to fade, some shallow critics regarded him an “imperialist poet” and his perfectly pitched and splendidly carved rhymed poems were deemed old-fashioned and much too patriotic. Helen Jenkins, his passionate collector and a fellow journalist, writes in conclusion: “He died in London on January 18, 1936, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He has been quoted as saying how fortunate he was that life had dealt him the cards it did – that all he had to do was play them as they lay – the two childhoods, East and West, that gave him two worlds; the journalism that taught him his trade and give him the whole dazzling tapestry of India to work on.”

Kipling autographs

 

This splendid gift of Mrs. Jenkins soon will be catalogued and added to the holdings of our Special Collections, thus making our Kipling collection second only to Harvard.

Special gratitude is extended to Mary Jordan, who sent us the picture of Helen Jenkins, her lecture about Kipling, and the obituary

*Adam Nicolson. The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling, 1862-1939. ISBN 0571208355

 

 

 

 

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Celebrating 75 Years of the Man of Steel

Celebrating 75 Years of the Man of Steel

Image-1It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s Superman’s 75th birthday!  On June 30, 1938, Superman debuted in Action Comics #1, marking the unofficial birth of superheroes in comic books.  Through decades of films, TV shows and comics, the Last Son of Krypton has permeated our culture and become as American as baseball and apple pie.

The creation and history of Superman is as fascinating and heartbreaking as Kal-El’s own fictional backstory.  In 1932, a young Jerry Siegel’s father died of a heart attack brought on by the robbery of the family’s small clothing store.  Within a few years, he and his artistically-minded friend Joe Shuster created Superman – an orphan who is virtually invincible, and who fights tirelessly to rid Metropolis of evildoers.  Siegel and Shuster are eventually commissioned to tell the character’s story in Action Comics. They agree to sell the rights of Superman for $130.

Superman radio serialThe Man of Steels, television shows and motion pictures soon followed.  While the radio was Superman’s preferred medium in the 40’s, come 1951, Iowa-born actor George Reeves donned the red and blue suit to portray the first live-action Man of Steel in the TV series, “The Adventures of Superman.”  Reeves stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way for the better part of a decade until he was killed in 1959 by a single gunshot wound to the head.  The circumstances surrounding his death are still a mystery.

After a twenty year absence, the Man of Tomorrow returned, this time played by Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s classic 1978 film, “Superman.”  Not only was the film a commercial and critical success, it holds a significant historical importance – “Superman” was the first major superhero movie ever released, paving the way for future blockbusters like “Batman”, “Spider-Man”, “Iron Man”, and “The Avengers.”  Reeve held the role for three more films, consistently surrounded by an all-star cast including Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Terence Stamp and Richard Pryor.  Tragically, the Man of Steel proved to be all too human off screen, as a horseback riding accident in 1995 left Reeve paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair until his death in 2004.

Our Worlds at War

The 1990’s and 2000’s were a transitional period for Superman.  He appeared in two very successful television series, first in “Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”, starring Dean Cain as Clark Kent, and then in “Smallville”, with Tom Welling taking the reins.  Both series took root in the hearts and minds of a new generation of Americans, and once again, Superman was soaring. In 2006, Brandon Routh took the lead in Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns.”  Cast partly for his likeness to the late Christopher Reeve, Routh’s Superman faced off against his arch nemesis Lex Luthor, portrayed by Academy Award-winner Kevin Spacey.  While the film was critically successful, it didn’t resonate well enough with audiences’ wallets to warrant a sequel.  For the last seven years, Americans haven’t seen much of Smallville’s favorite son.  Even the most recent actors to portray him – Dean Cain, Tom Welling and Brandon Routh – have all but faded from memory, as they struggled to find quality roles in Hollywood.

Kneel Before ZodBut that all changed last week with the record-breaking release of Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel”, starring Henry Cavill as Superman and Michael Shannon as the villainous General Zod.  The blockbuster proved that Americans’ fascination with Superman is only growing.  That love for the character will only continue to grow in the next few years, as star Cavill and director Snyder have both signed on for a sequel.  Additionally, Superman is slated to appear in the upcoming “Justice League” film, surrounded by fellow superheroes Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and Wonder Woman.

If your own interest in the character was piqued by the movie, feel free to fly in to Special Collections and check out our awesome assortment of Superman comics, graphic novels and books.  Everything you see here, and so much more, is available to you.  And unless you have X-Ray vision, you’ll need to get here faster than a speeding bullet and take a look yourself!

Custer’s Last Battle

Cover, Custer's Last Battle by Charles Francis Roe, published in 1925 by Robert Bruce

“Lieut. Bradley sends word that he has counted 196 dead cavalrymen on the hills to the left; what appeared yesterday in the distance like buffalo lying down are dead troopers and horses.”

So reads the journal of Edward J. McClernand, 2nd Lieutenant of the Montana Column. The scene he describes is the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn. On the afternoon of June 25th, 1876, George A. Custer, Lieutenant-Colonel of Seventh Cavalry, along with five companies of the Seventh Cavalry had faced a force of Sioux and their allies near a tributary of the Big Horn River. All of Custer’s forces perished, save for a single horse. The battle was part of the Sioux War, the outcome of the United States government’s failure to honor the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which granted territory in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana to the Sioux nation.

A horse named "Comanche" was the lone survivor of the Battle. Now stuffed, the horse remains on display in Lawrence, Kansas. Photo courtesy of the Musuem of Natural History, University of Kansas.

 

Page 29, detail. Photograph of Gall, leader of Sioux forces at the Battle of Little Bighorn

Special Collections houses a copy of Custer’s Last Battle by Brigadier-General Charles Francis Roe. Our copy was signed by Custer’s widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer. She presented this copy to late MU professor John Neihardt, whose entire library is now housed in Special Collections. The library is an especially rich source of Americana. Custer’s Last Battle (Rare JGN  E 467.1 C99 R7 1927) presents the reports of Charles Roe and other veterans of the Sioux War, accompanied by photographs and maps.

 

 

 

Page 1, detail. Autograph of Custer's widow, Elizabeth B. Custer
home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is seen by critics and the general public as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential novel, and is the novel he is most famous for.  It tells the story of a rich man named Jay Gatsby and his quest to regain a past love. As its most recent movie adaptation is currently playing in theaters, Special Collections invites you to take a look back on the novel and the man that created it.

The frontispiece of an edition of The Great Gatsby featuring Gatsby himself.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota and named after his second cousin three times removed, the Francis Scott Key of national anthem fame. While on academic probation at Princeton, Fitzgerald enlisted in the army in 1917.  In June 1918, he was assigned to a camp near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre.  In late 1919, after being discharged from the army and quitting his job in advertising, Fitzgerald began his career of writing short stories for magazines and other publications, with The Saturday Evening Post becoming his best story market.  He published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in March 1920 and married Zelda Sayre soon after.  His success and the extravagant lifestyle of the young couple soon earned him a reputation as a bit of a playboy.  He also became known as a heavy drinker, though he always wrote sober.  After the publication of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and the birth of his child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, in 1921, the Fitzgeralds moved to Long Island where F. Scott wrote short stories to cover the family's debt after his play, The Vegetable, failed to make it into production.  The family moved to France in the spring of 1924 so that F. Scott would be able to focus on his newest project, the novel that would become The Great Gatsby.

Before it became The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s novel went through many revisions and forms. Special Collections has in its possession a facsimile of one such early edition, entitled Trimalchio. This is an allusion to a Roman novel, The Satyricon by Petronius.  In this novel, Trimalchio is a freedman who has amassed power and wealth and shows this off by hosting exceedingly lavish dinner parties for his numerous guests.  This copy includes correspondence between Fitzgerald and a man by the name of Perkins, Fitzgerald’s friend and an employee of his publishers, in which Perkins makes suggestions for revision and suggests using a different title (pictured below right).

740002small

Shortly after this, Fitzgerald rewrote several aspects of his novel and reordered key scenes, such as the one where Gatsby’s past is illuminated.

Fitzgerald restructured the plot to make certain elements more meaningful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gatsby we know today comes in many different forms and editions.  One of the more unique Gatsbys at Special Collections comes in the form of a fantastical graphic novel adaptation by Nicki Greenberg, in which Jay Gatsby is portrayed as a seahorse
and the others as any number of creatures.

Votes are now being taken for guesses as to what kind of creature Daisy is.

 

There are also a number of more conventionally illustrated editions of The Great Gatsby in existence, such as the 1980 Limited Editions Club which is illustrated by artist Fred Meyer, whose recognizable style brings the Jazz Age to life on the page.

An illustration by Fred Meyer of Gatsby's mansion during one of his famous parties.

 

Most people are familiar with The Great Gatsby after having spent some time studying it at either a high school or college level.  From Professor Lago’s collection, we have her copy of The Great Gatsby, which has been heavily annotated for use as a teaching tool.  Her extensive notes comment on such key themes as morality and hope.  On the page shown here, she notes the importance of color symbolism, among other things.

740008small lago

In the years after The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald began work on his fourth novel, Tender is the Night.  Work on this novel was put on hold throughout the years due to Zelda Fitzgerald’s declining mental and physical health.  During her stay in a clinic in Switzerland, F. Scott returned to writing short stories for income.  He completed Tender is the Night in 1934, though it was ultimately a commercial failure.

In the summer of 1937, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.  It was there that he began an affair with columnist Sheilah Graham.  After MGM Studios dropped his contract at the end of 1938, he worked as a freelance script writer and continued writing short sories.  He began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had more than half of it written when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

Though Fitzgerald was not much of a commercial success during his lifetime, he is now considered to be the author of one of the “great American novels” and is esteemed for his accurate portrayals of the Jazz Age.  Many of his works, including collections of his short stories, are available for use by patrons in the Reading Room of Special Collections.

 

Bruccoli, Matthew J. "A Brief Life of Fitzgerald." Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, n.d. Web. 21 May 2013. http://www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/biography/index.html.

"Trimalchio." Trimalchio. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 May 2013.
<http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Trimalchio.html>.

Spring brings things

3 (detail)sm

And spring things bring people who collect them –naturalists and artists such as Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), the first to hitch entomology to fine art and to make a living doing so. Her interests were not limited to European species; she spent two years stalking the insects of Surinam, a colony the Dutch had acquired from the English in exchange for Manhattan about thirty years earlier. She devoted an equal amount of attention to giant flying roaches as to seemlier species, but there is no question that she had a special passion for caterpillars.

70001 sm

Merian's interest in metamorphosis led her to develop a new form of composition. She would depict a single species at each distinct phase simultaneously. She arranged these in a composition on and around the plant that formed its principal food source. In the image on the left several saw-fly specimens pose on a tulip. The caterpillar sits atop a gooseberry at the bottom center, while the adult fly prepares to land on a petal at the top right. In between on a stem and leaf are the pupa and larva. As Ella Reitsma, curator of a recent exhibit, observes about Merian's work, "In the details the drawing is realistic; as a whole it is anything but. The beautifully balanced composition conjures up a seeming realism, for the successive stages in the development of an insect can never be found together!  Tricks have been played with time and place” (15)

7(detail)sm

 

460001

Despite such innovation, Merian’s work languished for a long time under the misnomer “minor art.’ It has only recently come into its own, with exhibitions in Los Angeles and Amsterdam, and a digital exhibit hosted by The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Rare Book Collection. She is even the subject of a children’s book. Ingrid Rowland notes her “crystalline accuracy, ” her “incomparable precision,” and the “electric intensity” of her use of color. She asserts, “there is no question that she was an artist. Her disquieting view of life in all its forms has carefully, cleverly shaped every one of the images that seem, so deceptively, to present intimate, dispassionate snapshots of reality.”

Pervading her works is a healthy Aristotelian sense that something must be known in all its variousness. Working alongside this cognitive disposition, and perhaps encouraging it, was a habit that she shared with many contemporaries: collecting. Her life-like compositions conceal the artificial taxonomizing and categorizing that lie behind them, making it appear as if she had discovered, rather than created the scene depicted.

These are qualities that Peter the Great evidently appreciated; he was an avid collector of her work, much of which remains in the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. In 1974  The Leningrad Watercolours is a facsimile edition featuring fifty of the works housed there. It is a large-format edition limited to 1750 copies.  Several prints from the collection  are available to view in our reading room. The entire collection collection (RARE QH31 .M4516 .A34 1974) is also available to consult.

 

Select Bibliography

Reitsma, Ella, Maria Sibylla Merian and Daughters: Women of Art and Science. Amsterdam : Rembrandt House Museum, 2008.

Rowland, Ingrid. “The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian.” New York Review of Books. April 9, 2009.

Todd, Kim. Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Economic Frustration – Then and Now

Economic Frustration – Then and Now

In a tough economy, it's easy to forget that millions of Americans before our time have struggled as well. Cartoonist John T. McCutcheon's comics show that high unemployment and turmoil in the stock market aren't unique to this generation of Americans.

Figure 2
The Unemployed (click to enlarge)

Our McCutcheon comic collection contains original pen-and-ink drawings that date from 1903 to 1944, many of which were published in the Chicago Tribune. While he covered a range of issues of the day, McCutcheon's wit and biting satire shined in his depiction of economic hardships.

Figure 1
1913 Bread Line: He Kept Us out of Work (click to enlarge)

Figure 1 and Figure 2, from 1913 and 1916, both show the depression and struggle of being unemployed. McCutcheon demonstrates his mastery over the medium by using merely a few darker lines to show how isolated and alone his unemployed man is, compared to the happy and joyful families walking down the street.

We've seen a roller coaster ride in the stock market recently, but nothing compares to the Crash of 1929, which led to a decade-long Great Depression. Our last cartoons, Figures 3 and 4, show two instances of men who lost it all on Wall Street, and wonder if they'll ever get it back. Little do they, or McCutcheon know – the worst economic downturn in history is only beginning.

Figure 3
The Bursting of the Stock Bubble (click to enlarge)

John McCutcheon's comics captured the mood of the day, and sometimes it's surprising how much relevance 100-year old sketches can have to our own time. His entire collection of over 300 cartoons and drawings is available to all patrons.

Figure 4
The Sun of Prosperity… (click to enlarge)