Notes on the pieces
The document behind each piece — where it comes from, and why it matters. One study per piece.
Burn lower left
In 1938 William P. Gottlieb traded hundreds of records for a Speed Graphic press camera. The choosing happened before the shutter was released. This is about...
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Why H is a note
Read in German, four notes spell his name. One of them is called H. Where that letter comes from is a thousand years old, and Bach...
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What the paper printed
In 1976 Helen Snyder gave a New York museum two hundred and ninety objects, nearly all of them Japanese dye stencils. Almost nothing is known about...
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The eleventh sheet
In November 1898 Félix Vallotton issued ten woodcuts in thirty copies. Then he sawed a piece out of every block and printed the ten pieces together...
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Before the colour
Mary Cassatt made ten colour prints in Paris in 1890–91. Some of them survive in earlier forms as well: a drawing, a drypoint with no colour...
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She called the first one an imitation
In 1891 Mary Cassatt hung ten colour prints in a side room at Durand-Ruel, because the society of printmakers had just put the word "French" in...
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The only date is the one he cut himself
Twelve views of Chicago, made in a single year by a man who had spent thirty years etching Venice and Rouen. The museum that holds them...
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They all went down to the water
Eight prints of New York made between 1884 and the nineteen-thirties. Two of them stand three blocks apart, on the same stretch of the East River...
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The New Deal paid for this street
Three etchings of Manhattan by a man born in Kobryn. One still carries the stamp of the federal programme that paid for it. Another he inked...
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It illustrates nothing
The Black Cape is one of Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s banned Salomé — except it illustrates nothing in the play. It is a dress: a single...
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The last of the Rinpa
In 1901 the Japanese government sent Kamisaka Sekka to Glasgow. He met Art Nouveau there — a style Japan had helped invent — and brought it...
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The line, before colour
Hishikawa Moronobu was the son of an embroiderer, and he began by drawing patterns for cloth. Three and a half centuries ago he gave ukiyo-e its...
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If I am not grotesque, I am nothing
Aubrey Beardsley made this in colour — rare for him — in 1895, near the end. It shows Isolde raising the potion. He was self-taught, tubercular,...
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No more mills
In 1895 two young artists cut a Don Quixote out of black and brown paper for a theatre poster. Henry Irving took one look, said "No...
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The stars still wear his letters
In 1603, six years before the telescope, a Bavarian lawyer drew an atlas of the whole sky and lettered its stars from Tycho Brahe’s measurements. We...
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A stencil held together by silk
This is a katagami — a Japanese paper stencil, cut by hand and held together with a net of silk thread. It is the tool that...
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In his own hand
In April 1779 a twenty-three-year-old Mozart, home in Salzburg and chafing under an archbishop, wrote out an overture in his own hand and signed it. This...
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Euclid without letters
In 1847 an Irish engineer reprinted the first six books of Euclid with the letters torn out and pure colour put in their place. It bankrupted...
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The plant printed its own shadow
Anna Atkins made a book of photographs without a camera, by laying plants on paper and leaving them in the sun. She signed it "A.A.", and...
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The lizard walks on her verse
For twenty years a poet in Ipswich cut some eighty valentines by hand every February — each one drawn from a hat, each one inscribed with...
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I is another
In May 1871 a sixteen-year-old wrote a letter that broke poetry in two. Weeks later he asked for it to be burned.
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