Secrets From The Vault

Humanistic Relics: the vision of Jannis Kounellis

Submitted by Francesco Guzzetti on Sun, 02/14/2021 - 7:00pm

During my residency at the Morgan as a postdoctoral fellow at the Drawing Institute, I was particularly struck by a drawing in the collection. Made by the Greek-born Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), it was acquired in 2016 thanks to the generosity of the Morgan’s Modern & Contemporary Collectors Committee. The drawing related directly to my research, which focused on Italian drawing in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the King's Garden with Madeleine Françoise Basseporte

Submitted by Mary Creed on Wed, 06/30/2021 - 12:00pm

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed the flourishing of scientific illustration in Europe. In an intellectual climate that valued curiosity and experimentation, the goals of the artist frequently merged with those of the scientist. Before the invention of photography, artists needed to document botanical specimens quickly before they decayed. These visual records of plants aided in their identification and classification and also functioned as aesthetically pleasing works of art.

It was a dark and stormy night... and Arbaces cogs his dice with pleasure

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 3:26pm

His novels were Victorian best-sellers, but Edward Bulwer Lytton is not one of those authors you could say has aged very well.

Admired by King George IV (who, it is rumored, kept a Lytton novel at all of his residences), his popularity was on the same scale as that of Charles Dickens. Now, however, his name is used as a "byword for aesthetic embarrassment and incompetence," and he is perhaps best remembered for the opening line to Paul Clifford : "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals..."

John Ruskin's "Great Horse-Controversy"

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 05/05/2011 - 12:57pm

"Give a horse a nut," says John Ruskin, "and see if he can hold it as a squirrel can."

The great English critic was, in the fall of 1857, apparently in the midst of a "great horse-controversy" with Tinie, the young daughter of Ruskin's close friend Robert Horn. It seems that Tinie had recently come to the defense of the horse, and in a very lengthy letter (shown below) Ruskin attempted to convince her that "the horse is the most contemptible of animals."

John Ruskin's Puppet Show

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 1:49pm

John Ruskin was just ten years old when he wrote and illustrated The Puppet Show: Or, Amusing Characters for Children. The little book is filled with twenty-nine short poems, each of which is accompanied by two pen-and-ink drawings. The poems, as far as I can determine, are Ruskin's own, although some of the illustrations are copied from George Cruikshank's vignettes in Grimm's German Popular Stories, which was first published in London in 1823.

King John's 1205 Charter

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 2:41pm

King John, oh King John. Best remembered for signing the Magna Carta (after being forced by his barons to do so), losing most of England's territory on the continent (in a war triggered partially by his marriage to Isabelle of Angoulâme), and trying to seize the crown from his elder brother Richard the Lionheart (while Richard was being held captive by Duke Leopold of Austria), John's life and sixteen-year reign was violent and unpopular. The 13th-century chronicler Matthew Paris went so far as to declare "Hell is too good for a horrible person like him," although this general view has been somewhat tempered in the intervening 800 years.

Letters From Laurence Sterne to His "Dear Kitty"

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 03/22/2012 - 3:10pm

If you're going to write a love letter, you should probably get the name on the address panel correct. At least, if I was a fashionable young singer in the 18th century, I would probably pause a bit when opening a letter from an admirer (who had a reputation), which he seemed to have first addressed to someone else entirely.

Lewis Carroll’s Typewriter

Submitted by Sal Robinson on Fri, 08/24/2018 - 1:24pm

One of the questions my co-cataloguer on the Levy Project, Pam Abernathy, and I pose as we work our way through the collection of letters and manuscripts in the Morgan’s holdings is: how was it made? In most cases, it’s not complicated: the letter was written by hand, by the person who was responsible for its content. But in the case of MA 6390.3, a small scrap of paper that forms part of the Morgan’s large Lewis Carroll collection, matters were not so clear.