Blog

These three pieces from the Morgan’s music manuscript collection tell a lovely little story, moving the listener from the cold bleakness of winter into the brightness of spring. They are also three of the most popular digitized manuscripts on our website.

In this unwelcome new age of social distance and self-isolation, when many of us hardly venture beyond the thresholds of our homes, I find myself thinking about Nellie Mae Rowe’s “playhouse.”

The most recent acquisition by the Morgan’s Department of Drawings and Prints is a Head of a Girl dating to around 1590 by Denys Calvaert, purchased at Christie’s old master drawing auction in late January 2020. Because we have no immediate plans to exhibit the drawing, a blog post seems a good way to talk about Calvaert, the Head of a Girl, and why the drawing is a welcome addition to the Morgan’s collection.

In June of 2019, around sixty of the Morgan's most treasured medieval manuscripts were sent to Cleveland and Austin as part of the tour for our exhibition Terrors, Aliens, Wonders. Lending these treasures is a great way for us to share our collection with a wider audience, especially those far afield from New York City, but we miss them nonetheless.

After finishing my master’s thesis in the history of art and medieval history and working at and with different European museums, I wanted to gain more knowledge about other international collections, their history as well as how their art is handled. My interaction with the Morgan Collection started a few years ago in Germany.

Chalk, pen, wash, paper. Simple materials that create an overwhelmingly complex picture. Until February 2, 2020, the Morgan Library & Museum will exhibit Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman, a reflection on choice pieces from the Morgan’s collection by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591–1666), who was “arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era.”

One of my favorite aspects of my job as a curator at the Morgan Library & Museum is when high school and university classes come to see rare materials. The Morgan is not affiliated with a university, so, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, classes must make a bit of a trek to visit these relics.

On October 4th, 2019, John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal opened at the Morgan Library & Museum, showcasing heretofore underappreciated aspects of Sargent’s iconic oeuvre. Because he was known primarily as a painter of early-twentieth-century European and American elite, the public is most familiar with his highly-finished representations of the grand and great.

This is a guest post by Sam Bussan, a PhD student in the Department of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

I spent this summer at the Morgan working with the Literary & Historical Manuscripts Department to catalog the Maria Knox Letters. This collection of sixty-three letters, almost exactly two centuries old, records the life of a British family in India from 1816 to 1822.

This is a guest post by Dawn-Elin Fraser, Associate Arts Professor, Head of Spoken Voice and Speech for the New Studio on Broadway at NYU.

As an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I teach in the New Studio on Broadway, where our students focus on both musical theater and heightened text. Our student body is talented, eager, and hungry for opportunity. It is also a student population that is overwhelmingly female identified, though the cannon of heightened text (particularly period centered) is primarily written by men with male characters at the heart of the narrative. I wanted to do something to shift that.

This is a guest post by Sean Nortz, a PhD student in the Department of English at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

I was very pleased to be granted a CUNY Graduate Center fellowship this summer to work on the Morgan Library & Museum’s collection of extra-illustrated books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Morgan's Exhibitions on Verdi and Sendak as Explorations of Collaboration and Creativity

One might consider the Morgan’s current exhibitions Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff—Highlights from the Ricordi Archive and Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet to have little in common, save for a shared connection to opera. But in fact, there is much linking these two exhibitions, which explore similar themes of artistic resurgence and the power of collaboration and adaptation.

This is a guest post by Eric Dean Wilson, writer, educator, and doctoral student in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

I’d spent two weeks in the Morgan Library & Museum Reading Room when María Molestina offered to take me to see where they store the Peter Hujar Collection. It’s a humbling experience to see spread before you a life in boxes.

This is a guest post by Timothy Gress, currently an undergraduate at Manhattan College.

I first came to the Morgan Library & Museum to view the exhibition I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson in 2017. During my initial visit I was struck not only by this carefully curated exhibition, but also by works on display in J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library—especially a first edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Little did I know that I would soon have the opportunity to write exhibition labels for these same exhibit cases as part of the Morgan’s Treasures from the Vault series.

This is a guest post by Abraham Samuel Shiff, who studies historical topics and has published on William Shakespeare and William Blake.

When I reached retirement age in 2006, I was free to return to graduate studies full time. I enrolled in the history department of Brooklyn College and also studied at the Graduate Center. In a course on the history of science at the Graduate Center, I was assigned to report on an Elizabethan mathematician who was the first to publish in English on the radical theory of Copernicus.

This is a guest post by Armando Chávez-Rivera, Scholar in Residence at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress.

In my research, I try to understand important books written in the American hemisphere and inspired by canonical works of the Spanish language and literature from Spain.

This is a guest post by Saira Haqqi, book and paper conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Every book conservator wonders about the past lives of the books she works on, and I am no exception. It is particularly intriguing when the book bears the marks of an individual craftsperson rather than an industrial bindery.

This is a guest post by Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, a writer and historian, specializing in modern world history and modern European history.

I came to the Morgan Library & Museum in search of Eleanor Franklin Egan, a forgotten writer of the First World War. While preparing my book manuscript for the First World War, Anticolonialism and British India, 1914–1924 (Routledge, forthcoming), I saw a reference to writings by Eleanor Franklin Egan (1879–1925).

This guest post is by Susie J. Pak, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University (New York).

When I began working on my dissertation at the Morgan Library & Museum in June 2001, researchers still entered from the 36th Street entrance, and the librarians sat in the center of the Reading Room at a raised oval desk. By the time the Piano renovation was completed, I had finished my dissertation, and I returned to the Morgan to the newly modernized Reading Room, where I spent many days for several years until my book, Gentlemen Bankers, went to press in 2012.

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.