BMA Trip

Last week, on Tuesday, my mentor and I spent a good portion of our day visiting the Baltimore Museum of Art. We spent all of our time down in the registrar office space looking over Woodward related files, searching for correspondence between Elsie Woodward and the museum about the art collection. Very little was discovered but we left with a few copies of certain documents we found interesting or of use to my project. It probably sounds very boring but I had such a great time reading through everything. I'm very thankful for the opportunity that was given to us. The BMA staff is too kind!

I'm trying to remember what we did the week before - I'm so bad at keeping this blog updated - and I think I spent most of the time choosing what prints/objects to use in the catalog. I started working on tombstone information and gathering credit lines.

I helped do inventory one day down in the storage building...learned about feedsack quilts...

Here, have some pictures.

A document I thought would be helpful to my project.

Pretty painted photograph of Fenelon, a Woodward horse.

Example of what tombstone information should look like.

Eclipse award.

Eclipse Award looking creepy.

Feedsack quilt!

More quilt.

Working on Catalog Project

So it's been a few weeks since I last posted anything about my internship, I apologize for that. Two vacations happened and I wasn't about to not have fun this summer (went to Florida and Rehoboth Beach, DE). Before I become a "real" adult I felt I needed to visit family and friends! So I did. It was fun, saw a shark...
Anyway, now I'm back to work and I have been steadily researching the Woodward Art Collection. I've gathered quite a few primary sources to help support what I will be writing about for this catalog including two books written by William Woodward himself.
Through all of this research I have learned a lot about equine portraiture. I never knew it became it's own genre until the 19th century. One of the most prominent artists of that time period was a man by the name of John Frederick Herring,Sr. William Woodward's art collection consisted of many Herring horse portraits.

Here are some random pictures of notes and art prints I have been looking at the past couple of days:

I think I'm at 80 something hours so far, too! The project probably wont be finished by the time I reach 100 but that's okay, I plan to stay until the very end.

Cataloging and Transcribing

My mentor trained me in using the cataloging software PastPerfect on Monday. To do this, she gave me a small bag filled with 23 Bowie Race Track Betting Tickets from April 7, 1942. I was to catalog all 23 tickets to forever be stored into the museum system.

Here a picture of some of the tickets

It was pretty neat to be able to touch something from 1942. It's funny but true.

I think it was last week that I mentioned I was transcribing a probate inventory. I have a photo of a part of the inventory that I can share now. I have already transcribed it into a word document.

Project Planning

This week was all about planning out the project I will be working on for the mansion. We have decided that I will be creating a catalog that depicts and explains the Woodward Art Collection, specifically anything that has to deal with horses.

Looking through PastPerfect today my mentor and I grabbed anything that was under the search key 'Woodward', exported the list to excel, and deleted anything that wasn't a photo, print, trophy, painting, etc... For example there were books that had nothing to do with horses or horse racing so those were deleted off the excel spreadsheet.

The next step was to look through the physical vertical files and pull anything ranging from old documents of the Woodward estate inventory to articles, letters, emails, and auction catalogs relating to the art work. We looked through each of the documents and then I was sent away to make copies. So I made the copies, had a meeting with my supervisor about what I'd be doing, and that was it.

Tomorrow and next week I will be reading over everything I collected, possibly going into the storage facility to look at the objects/art work stored away, and figuring out what I want to interpret. I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment but the gathering process is almost over!

This is a picture of a part of a document I will be using for my catalog