Digital Treasure Trove: The Watercolors of William Trost Richards
Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections
For the last several photography sessions, the collections team has been working to photograph a unique set of small watercolor paintings by the artist William Trost Richards (1833-1905). With some slight variations, the dozens of paintings are each only a little larger than 3×5” and depict a range of beautiful wide-angle landscape scenes. The images are executed in striking detail for their scale and medium. Together, the works demonstrate a superior command of light and texture. It has been a pleasure to spend time photographing these works, and once the project is finished, they can each be viewed and enjoyed in significantly greater resolution.
William Trost Richards – Boats at Pier for Joseph Wharton’s Workmen, Conanicut Island (1883), Watercolor on paper, 3 3/16 x 5 1/8 in. (8.09625 x 13.0175 cm.). Gift of Dorrance H. Hamilton in memory of Samuel M. V. Hamilton, 2008.5.87
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
As the collections team has been photographing some of PAFA’s framed paintings over the last several weeks, we have been able to enjoy documenting the rarely seen reverse side of these works.
In the museum world, we define recto as the front or main image and the verso as the back or reverse secondary image. So why may we want to photograph the verso?
Many paintings in our collection have a long exhibition and ownership history, and this provenance can be followed through various notes, labels, stickers, and other markings on the backs of frames. Pictured below are a few examples of works in the middle of being photographed showing the front side view (recto), followed by the corresponding reverse side of the painting (verso).
Fox Grapes and Peaches, (1815) Raphaelle Peale, Oil on wood.
Fox Grapes and Peaches, verso, (1815) Raphaelle Peale, Oil on wood.
The Painter’s Triumph, (1838) William Sidney Mount, Oil on wood.
The Painter’s Triumph, verso, (1838) William Sidney Mount, Oil on wood.
Fourth of July in Centre Square, (1812) John Lewis Krimmel, Oil on canvas.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
As part of our ongoing IMLS grant project to digitize portions of our collection, we are continuing to photograph works in our collection, but we are also beginning to process and edit some of these new images in preparation for their integration into PAFA’s databases.
If you have followed the Museum’s previous digitization initiatives, then you should know that these efforts are resource intensive. It is important that we take the time to digitally capture works of art that represent our collection as true-to-life as possible. To ensure we obtain high quality digital assets, there are two points in the digitization workflow that we focus on: 1. the moment we take the photo 2. the post-production work done after digital capture. For paintings and works on paper, this can be as simple as adjusting for the amount and color of the light, ensuring the work is square to the lens, and cropping as needed. For sculptures and 3-dimensional works, however, there are many additional variables that need addressing, including the consistency of the gradient background.
In a perfect world, the background would appear perfectly consistent across our hundreds of images, but this is not always the case. Often when shooting the images, the accuracy of the represented object must be prioritized over the look of the background, leaving artifacts in the image like folds in the paper or markings from other sculptures. To address this, we must correct these issues in post-production.
For every individual image that requires this correcting, we must break them down into three separate Photoshop layers: (1) an isolated background without the object (2) a copy of this isolated background without the object that has had a gaussian blur applied to it (3) a top layer that has only the isolated object. These layers are then carefully stitched together in such a way that the distractions of the “imperfect” background are fixed, while preserving all the necessary elements of the artwork (the object itself and its shadows) to create a clean, long-lasting, and useful image.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
An important step of the digitization workflow is post-production. This step always performed after the actual digital asset is created, hence the prefix “post”. This crucial process allows us to make minor adjustments for things like light and color, as well as cropping the dimensions to match the work being viewed. Sometimes, this is as simple as matching the rectangular edge of a TIFF file to the edge of a rectangular painting. Other times, this is more complicated, with works that are not perfectly square, are three-dimensional, or have other non-standard edges. In any case, it is our job to produce and maintain these cleaned up images—what we would call “access files” for broad dissemination to our audiences. These files are unique and distinct from our archival “master files,” which do not get the ‘post-production’ treatment and are kept for posterity.
It has been a slow task, with the need to go through and edit images one by one, but we are nearly finished. In fact, the Museum is almost ready to integrate these legacy files with the newly photographed works of art taken this year.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
We are nearing the end of the weeks-long process of renaming the files in our digital collection. As mentioned before, this work was important for establishing a file naming convention/schema to improve its usefulness and accessibility both internally and externally. Doing so is one of many parts of our IMLS grant project, and so far, has included a combination of automated computer scripting via Python, and slowly combing through the filenames by hand.
With this combination of tools, we were able to confidently correct the names of approximately 16,000 files, which was a huge step forward for the project and PAFA’s collection team. During this process, however, we identified over 1,000 files that were either unnecessary duplicates or were files that did not carry with it enough information to adequately identify them in our database.
These duplicate and mystery files arose from the old folder structures that we are no longer using and have recently phased out as part of this file renaming process. Formerly, things could hide and get copied, moved, updated, and renamed without any meaningful way to ensure that outdated or unnecessary files are removed. In the process of migrating files to fewer sub-directories, which use only their unique accession number to identify them, it became immediately clear which files need review and correction, beyond a simple renaming.
Once the duplicates were double checked, they were easily discarded. The unknown files, however, we had no way of knowing how important any given file might be. Out of a commitment to thoroughness the collections team decided to work together to identify several hundred of these files, often by finding some physical works in our storage vault that could be related. Only after reasonable certainty could be reached would we know for sure how to rename (and then either keep or discard) these mystery files. This process alone took around two weeks but has resulted in a repaired digital archive that is ready for the introduction of our new high-resolution photography from this year.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The Museum Collections Team is pleased to introduce L Autumn Gnadinger (they/them/theirs), who will be stepping into the role of the Museums Collections Assistant through the remainder of the IMLS grant project. L is an artist, writer, and educator with a background in museum work. They earned their MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and have previously studied at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, IN and Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. L is a former Core Fellow of Penland School of Craft in Bakersville, NC, and an editor and co-founder of the journal Ruckus, which engages art in the American Midsouth and Midwest.
With a range of experience in photography, design, and file management stemming from their work with Ruckus, L will be helping PAFA with its core goals of photographing works of art in the permanent collection, updating the file management connected to the permanent collection, and finally testing out the new content management system for the new—forthcoming—online collection.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
In addition to rephotographing the permanent collection, the other goal of our current IMLS grant is the streamlining and unification of our file management and file naming systems for our digitized collections. Given PAFA’s long history and the many hands that have made the Museum possible since its founding, there have been many different organizing schemes to keep the collection in order, and since the advent of digitized collection and databases, many more still to keep the file names organized.
In 2022, we have inherited many generations of images and information, and to best carry them forward in a safe and useful way—and to prepare for the migration to a new database soon—we need to reorganize and rename all the files in our digital collection.
To summarize the issue: every artwork is different, and over the years the file names of PAFA’s digital collection have prioritized different information like artwork names, artist names, year of creation, names of donors, location the image was taken, conservation notes, and finally, the accession number, just to name a few. Our goal was to standardize these file names with what they all have in common and what is most unique to them—their accession number.
This number, generally, is a compound of many different pieces of information such as the year PAFA acquired it, which acquisition group or gift did a work come to PAFA through in that year, and what number in each group is the artwork itself (among other pieces of information). From this number, we can easily link a specific artwork to any corresponding information we have about it in our database.
Take the number 2004.20.4, which is the accession number for the work Conjunction by Romare Bearden. We might find this filename in our database as “BEARDEN-2004_20_4.tif,” which, can certainly be used to correctly identify this work as it has done since it was acquired by PAFA in 2004, but even the addition of the last name of “BEARDEN-” as a prefix to the accession number makes for clunky cross-system use when not all the other file names match this same scheme.
The process for us to rename all these files, on paper, is simple enough. We just need to look for their accession number in the file name (usually buried under or inside of other unnecessary information) and replace all of this with just the simple accession number by itself. But this becomes immediately complicated as we find accession numbers that are formatted differently from one another or use version codes that are inconsistent with each other year to year.
To do this by hand, file by file, is, of course, technically possible but would be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Thankfully, we have found a way to write and implement custom computer code (more commonly called a “script”) to automate most of this process using the programming language Python.
Python is an incredibly flexible and powerful coding language, and through a variety of techniques, we have been able to instruct these custom scripts to automatically identify what is (and isn’t) a PAFA accession number among other kinds of information inside of a file name, and then delete what isn’t wanted or required. The script also helps us flag files that don’t have a proper accession number at all, or have more complicated naming issues, which we can then set aside to look at by hand. The result, after applying the script to over 26,000 files, is a unified and easy to use set of file names, and a database overall that is ready for migration to a new and better system.
This blog post is part of an ongoing series about Digital Collections that we are able to undertake thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Summer in Philadelphia may be winding down, but things at PAFA are just starting to ramp up as we begin the early fall season. There is a lot to catch up on from just the last several weeks: the moving of the outdoor sculpture Grumman Greenhouseby Jordan Griska after 11 years on Lenfest Plaza, installation and prep of our upcoming showsEvade or Ensnare and Making American Artists, as well as fall classes at the school starting back up this month. And things with the IMLS Project Team is just as busy. We’ve continued working all summer on the most challenging phase of the IMLS grant project, photographing the permanent art collection.
We’ve changed course from photographing 2D works to taking photographs of the 3D works specifically in the Museum’s Sculpture Study Center (SSC). In this gallery, there is a wide array of objects in various mediums, each with their own set of challenges for documentation. Additionally, since the SSC is open to the public during Museum hours, we only have a limited number of days per week when things are closed to setup a temporary photography environment, work through as many objects as possible, and then break down again to make way for visitors.
We soon realized photographing sculptures presented other challenges in our workflow. First, art handling works on paper compared to 3D sculpture was dramatically different. Some works were fragile, while others were solid and sturdy. Art handling for sculptures made from bronze, stone, plaster, terracotta, or wood all proved challenging and required us to be really careful as some works were hundreds of years old or some were very heavy. The material/color of each sculpture also required different backdrops and lighting. We ended up planning our days around dark and light colored sculptures so we didn’t need to change the backdrop often. And finally, since a single 2D image cannot fully represent all viewing angles of a 3D space, each sculpture is being photographed at least ten times: four side views, four quarter angle views, and two 1/8th angle views. The effect of this will be a very useful (approximate) 360-degree global view of each artwork.
This workflow requires staff to move a—potentially very heavy—object, refocusing the camera by hand, adjusting the lighting, and finally, taking the image. Overall, it has been a slow but rewarding process, and we feel the finished images will provide a much more comprehensive set of digital assets—for future researchers and the general public—to view online.
In fact, the usefulness of a more comprehensive set of viewing angles has been immediately clear as we have spent time with each object. A good example might be any of the several Abraham Lincoln life masks currently on view in SSC. Aside from being interesting objects by themselves, they—like many of the objects in PAFA’s collections—have a variety of notes, marking, and surprising armatures on their reverse sides, that might not always be visible to the public, but all contribute to the unique character and story of each work.
We will soon be turning our attention to back to Works on Paper (WOP) and different aspects of the IMLS grant but we have enjoyed our time with the objects in SSC this summer and hope you will too the next time you are visiting the musem or browsing the new and forthcoming online collection.
This blog post is part of an ongoing series about Digital Collections that we are able to undertake thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Contributed by HoJun Yu, Project Museum Collections Assistant, and Hoang Tran, Director of Archives
As America’s first museum and art school, it is important for PAFA to remain relevant particularly in the digital age. Broadening online access to the works of art is one step in the right direction, but also providing greater accessibility for users to engage and use the resources is another important aspect of the institution’s mission.
The work being done for this grant project provides the essential framework for PAFA’s long-term goal of migrating the museum’s collection into the public domain. PAFA aspires to join the growing global initiative of more than 200 institutions worldwide that have moved towards digitizing and providing unrestricted use of their collections.
We are in the process of figuring out the best way to display rights statements and/or licenses for works in PAFA’s collection. Part of HoJun’s work is conducting a survey of peer institutions that have successfully implemented Open Access (OA) initiatives such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Cleveland Museum of Art. We also reviewed MoMA and the Whitney to see how they are publicizing rights statements–the two museums directly state the names of parties in control of reproduction rights; on the other hand, places like the Smithsonian simply state use Creative Commons license, particularly Creative Commons Zero (CC0–no rights reserved).
It must be said that as museum collections staff, we are not experts in copyright law. In fact, copyright is highly complex and it is important that everyone working with copyright protected materials adhere to current US copyright laws. We as collections staff have been studying and examining best practices on handling digital resources and respecting artists rights.
For this phase of the project, there are two essential data points that we are currently focusing on which his required to properly interpret/assess copyright 1: the date of creation; 2: date of creator’s death. HoJun is focused on reviewing all works with questionable or missing dates and updating life dates for artists. Our ultimate goal with this information is to help us make a more informed decision as to which works are still protected by copyright and which works are no longer protected by copyright. Of course, nothing ever comes easy! PAFA’s collection includes many works by “unidentified artists” and works with “unknown dates”. For these outliers, we’ll need to be extra vigilant in assessing their copyright status.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The Archives is happy to announce that staff have recently completed organizing and uploading two new digital collections.
The first digital collection of 627 photographs are part of the Alumni Gallery photographs. The photographs document the exhibition openings for 10 alumni gallery exhibitions from 2011-2014. The Alumni Gallery exhibits works by alumni from all of PAFA’s matriculating programs. Located within the Historic Landmark Building, the Alumni Gallery offers a contemporary view of PAFA’s longstanding traditions in art-making and is always free and open to the public.
Inaugural exhibition opening reception for PAFA’s Alumni Gallery, 2011.
The second digital collection is the Annual Student Exhibition and Graduation photographs which consists of 9498 photographs. The collection documents various year end events for students, specifically the Annual Student Exhibition; Preview Party; public opening; award and prize ceremony; luncheon; graduation and commencement ceremony; as well as alumni reunion party.
Graduating class of 2016Family and friends attending 104th Annual Student Exhibition after graduation ceremony, 2005.
