We at AAS are excited to be embarking on a culinary road trip this summer! What’s a culinary road trip, you might ask? A culinary road trip is an AAS social media series featuring AAS staff members traveling back in time and across the country (we’re not really doing either, but it’s fun to imagine) by ...
Did you miss the Radiant with Color & Art exhibition featuring a portion of the AAS’s large archive of McLoughlin Brothers material that was shown at the Grolier Club last winter? Yes? Then you’re in luck! The exhibition has now been fashioned into a colorful online exhibit showcasing the history and work of the McLoughlin Brothers, the New York publishing ...
My favorite part of cataloging is figuring out a mystery. When little information is given with an object and I am able to solve that mystery, I’m a happy camper. So when a set of three photographs came across my desk, one of them a very sweet image of children holding rabbits and chickens, I ...
After many years of inventorying, identifying and digitizing, the Society’s collection of nearly 500 watch papers are now available as an illustrated inventory! Watch papers are small, decorative pieces of paper or cloth that are meant to protect the mechanisms of watches, and were also used to indicate when a watch was last repaired and ...
In 1858, John Woodhouse Audubon, son of John James Audubon, set out to recreate the success of his father’s work Birds of America, published in 1838 with four hundred large, hand-colored engravings. John Woodhouse partnered with lithographer Julius Bien and the publishing firm of Roe, Lockwood & Company to create a less-expensive set than the ...
As we draw towards the end of summer, we can now look forward to fair season! Town, county, and state fairs are happening around the country and are filled with plenty of food and entertainment. Luckily, our newest illustrated inventory looks at the New England Fair here in Worcester during the early 1920s through the ...
For some collections within the Graphic Arts Department, we do not catalog each item in the collection individually. Sometimes, it makes more sense to create one all-encompassing record that describes the collection as one entity to avoid redundancy in the catalog. These collections are still easily found in the online catalog, and they will usually ...
The Pike and Wright Collection, donated by Susan Pike Corcoran, has brought to AAS more than the typical materials of photographs, diaries, books, and letters. Along with the genealogical material, a collection of medical instruments used by Dr. Nathan Staples Pike (1819-1857) is now housed within the Graphic Arts Department. You might remember seeing Dr. ...
In December 2014, AAS member Joanne S. Gill gave the Society a copy of Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art, published in 1897. The work, in four volumes, describes the collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics collected by William T. Walters of Baltimore, now housed along with some of the original Prang watercolors in the ...
When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...
It’s no wonder Louis Prang is considered the “Father of the American Christmas Card.” During the height of chromolithography in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, Prang’s firm in Boston introduced the concept of the Christmas card to America and produced over 5 million greeting cards per year. While Prang’s Christmas cards are displayed often, in ...
The holiday rush has started for us all, so we hope you will forgive us at Past is Present for having taken a bit of a break recently. To kick off the month of December, in the spirit of Christmas giving, please accept these chromolithographed Christmas cards as our present from the past. Click on ...
As the cataloger for AAS's Prints in the Parlor project, I've been working with gift books and annuals now for fifteen months. In that time, I've found few images that represent scenes of Christmas. This is surprising because many of the annuals were given as Christmas gifts and have titles that you would think have ...
With all of the media buzz around the recent nuptials of Chelsea Clinton, I thought of another presidential wedding: the marriage of Nellie Grant to English aristocrat Algernon Sartoris in 1874. Eighteen year-old Nellie Grant was the only daughter of Ulysses S. and Julia Grant. She met Sartoris, the son of the famous singer Adelaide Kemble (sister of Fanny) ...
I recently spent a week in Salt Lake City on vacation. One of the sites I visited was the FamilySearch library at Temple Square, run by the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints. I’ve found most of my family history with the genealogical resources at the AAS, but I thought it would be fun to ...
