If this webpage is anything
to go by, it seems Mrs Gott bequeathed things all over the place and the
Brotherton library is no exception. We have the couple’s papers and very many
artworks, mostly drawings and prints. A lot of these depict scenes of Leeds or
old plans – here’s one:
These are either in the store
or displayed around the library but (fun times for me) not all of them have
records. The notes left by a previous art gallery collections manager indicated
that there were a few Gott Bequest things around – she even left some images –
but I just couldn’t account for all of them. Then I had the brainwave that,
instead of doing any more fruitless searches on the database, why didn’t I just
LOOK AROUND?!! I can tell this will be an important lesson in my archiving
career. In a few minutes I’d found several prints that I’d been searching for,
which means I can start to make records for them. Then (taking the ‘look around’
idea to a new level) I glanced slightly to the right just before entering
Special Collections to return the store key and saw two more Gott pictures on
the wall! How many hundreds of times had I walked past those?!
Well, I’ll try and contain my
excitement and not write any more about that because when I told my manager
about it at my 1-to-1 she said she wanted me to write a blog post for Special
Collections about all this because I could ‘get some emotion into it’! I can’t
remember past blog posts of theirs being especially emotional but I’ve told her
I’ll do my best. So I’m going to be blogging for the Special Collections
website! Obvs will post a link when it’s live.
I also asked if there were
any chance I could take photos for my own blog and she said I potentially could
do a couple, but I don’t think I’ll be doing many if at all unfortunately. As
well as anything else, there’s something I hadn’t thought of – issues around
copyright. You can’t publish something that is inside copyright without
permission, and the rule generally is that the writer or artist has to have
been dead for 70 years. From what I gather, it seems that this includes
reproduction of images. So the portraits might be a possibility but the Edith
Culman collages would be out. I’m sure people take photos of people’s art and
stick it on the net all the time but apparently you can’t do this officially.
Anything we digitise and put on our website also has to be within copyright. It’s
been suggested that I might even be able to write some letters requesting
permission at some point; watch this space!
More finds followed while in
work yesterday… For no reason whatsoever, while in the stacks I went and had a
look at the Cottingley Fairies collection, but that’s for another time! I then went
and deframed the Pease Family Portrait and got a huge surprise. When I’d
removed the frame, underneath was a small stretcher with quite a large pencil drawing
of a young girl on it. It was inscribed ‘Cara, 1921’. Why had Marian Pease
covered up this lovely drawing with a photograph of a portrait? A possible
answer emerged when I took the stretcher down to show the conservator. She
looked at it closely and pointed out that it was not an entirely genuine pencil
drawing, but a print that someone had added to in pencil. Maybe this was why it
hadn’t been deemed worth displaying – it wasn’t a ‘proper’ drawing. Meanwhile,
the back of the stretcher had been padded with a Radio Times from 1941 –
interesting in itself! I pictured the scene: it’s wartime and Marian Pease
doesn’t want to spend money on frames, so she takes this picture of a family
member, one she’s not particularly fond of but doesn’t want to throw away, puts
the photograph of her father’s family over the top, stuffs it with this week’s
Radio Times and puts a simple frame around the whole thing.
And who is Cara? It’s
Margaret Cara Benson Rablen, who, along with her sister, bequeathed the Ford
family portraits collection. She was born in 1914, died in 2011 (you can see
her obituaries on Leicester Quaker sites) and is the great-granddaughter of
Hannah Pease. Much to impress my manager with for next time, ha ha!
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