This week’s blog post comes to us from collections intern Rebecca Schott. Hubert Francois Gravelot was a French illustrative artist during the early half of the 1700’s, and is credited with bringing the French Rococo style to English decorative art. Gravelot began his career by studying art in Paris and Rome but eventually settled on …
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R.I.P. Cervantes and Shakespeare
2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both William Shakespeare (whose 450th birthday we celebrated two years ago) and Miguel de Cervantes. Traditionally it has been claimed that both men died on the same date: April 23, 1616, but modern scholars have thrown a wrench into the works by suggesting that Cervantes probably …
William Morris
We have posted before about William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, which strove to elevate the craft of hand-printing in the late 19th-century. but the Rosenbach also has an interesting example of Morris’s work in another arena: textile design. William Morris (1834-1896) wore many hats in his life: poet, novelist, artist, printer, manufacturer, political activist, and more. …
Words on Wordsworth
Given that it is both Poetry Month and William Wordsworth’s birthday (his 146th) I thought it might be a good time to showcase a few Wordsworthian items from our small but fascinating collection of the poet. We have several letters from Wordsworth to Joseph Cottle, who published his Lyrical Ballads, but for this post I’ll …
April Fooling
The idea of April Fools is nothing new. In the 18th century, bookseller William Creech, who published Burns’s poetry, responded to an April Fools’ joke with this retort: I pardon, sir, the trick you’ve play’d me When an April fool you made me ; Since one day only I appear What you, alas ! do …
Gold Rush Washout
Inspired by the limericks from a few weeks back, this week we’re highlighting another humorous book from our collections: Journey to the gold diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags. This book of comic drawings was published in 1849, at the height of the gold rush, and pokes fun at the over-eager would-be gold miners. Journey to the …
Stamping Out the Stamp Act
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, which was passed on March 22, 1765 and repealed on March 18, 1766. As you may (or may not) recall from your American history classes, the Stamp Act was a tax on printed paper, including newspapers, legal documents, and playing cards. It was …
Marvelous Miniatures: Anna Claypoole Peale
Anna Claypoole Peale, born in 1791, came from an accomplished family of artists. Her uncle was the famous Charles Willson Peale and her father, James Peale, had been trained by his older brother and was an accomplished painter of miniatures and, later on, of still lives. (Unlike her cousins, Anna avoided the pressure of being …
There Was A Sweet Girl of Kingsessing…
In 1846 Edward Lear published an illustrated collection of 72 limericks entitled A Book of Nonsense. The volume, which is referenced in our exhibit Wonderland Rules: Alice at 150 , helped popularize the limerick form and inspired a number of similar books by other people and organizations. One of these, The New Book of Nonsense, …
Dos-a-dos, It’s Not Just for Square Dancing
The books in the Rosenbach’s collection are fascinating for many different reasons, but this little gem has one of my favorite bindings. It is actually two separate texts bound together in what is known as a dos-a-dos binding. Dos-a-dos means “back to back” in French and that is exactly what this type of binding is. …