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(b Pittsburgh, PA, May 25, 1874; d Albuquerque, NM, June 6, 1960).

American painter and illustrator. Raised in Dayton, OH, Blumenschein showed an early aptitude for music, art, and sports. Upon graduating from high school, he began training as a musician on a violin scholarship at the Music Academy of Cincinnati. Blumenschein left the Academy after a year and enrolled in the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he received a prize for illustration in Fernand Harvey Lungren’s class. In 1893, he moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League, where his instructors included John Twachtman and Kenyon Cox. Over the course of the next 15 years, he moved back and forth between New York and Paris, periodically visiting other locales, including Taos, NM, Italy, and Giverny. He twice enrolled at the Académie Julian (1894–6 and 1899), where he studied with Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. In 1905, he married artist Mary Shepard Greene (1869–1958), and, with the birth of their daughter in ...

(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

(b Roxbury, MA, Sept 14, 1867; d New York, NY, Dec 23, 1944).

American illustrator. Gibson’s graphic creation, the “Gibson Girl,” became a symbol of upper-middle-class American womanhood from 1890 to 1914. The Gibson Girl’s appearance and dress were widely imitated and her popularity helped shape social attitudes at a time when women’s roles were undergoing dramatic changes.

Growing up in Massachusetts and New York City, Gibson entered the Art Students League at 16, studying there for two years. In 1885 he left school to make a living as an illustrator. Gibson drew in pen-and-ink, his medium for the rest of his career, but his early sketches were stiff and labored. In 1886 he sold his first drawing for $4 to Life, a weekly humor magazine. Emulating the draftsmanship of the British cartoonists John Leech, Charles Keene, George Du Maurier and Phil(ip William) May, Gibson developed a freer and more economical style. He successfully sold arch scenes of politics and society to Life...

American library in Saint John’s University, Collegeville, MN, founded in 1965. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML; formerly the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library) contains over 115,000 microfilm and digital images of medieval, Renaissance, early modern and Eastern Christian manuscripts. To fulfil its mission of preserving endangered manuscripts and making them more accessible to scholars, HMML photographs entire manuscript libraries that lack the resources to preserve their own collections, are inaccessible to researchers, or are in immediate danger of destruction. Until 2003, HMML photographed entire manuscripts on black and white microfilm and shot selected illuminations in colour. When the Library switched to digital photography in 2003, it shot entire volumes in colour and recorded codicological information.

The vast majority of HMML’s holdings reproduce texts predating 1600. Nearly half of HMML’s Western manuscripts derive from libraries in Austria and Germany, but HMML also houses significant collections from Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and England. The Maltese collections are particularly important and include the Archives of the Knights of Malta. HMML has photographed collections of Eastern Christian manuscripts since the 1970s, and its collections of Armenian, Syriac, and Christian Arabic manuscripts are becoming the most significant resource for the study of Eastern Christian manuscripts in the world. HMML has by far the world’s largest collection of Ethiopian manuscripts preserved on microfilm and in digital form....

(b Brooklyn, NY, Oct 27, 1877; d White Plains, NY, July 13, 1949).

American painter, illustrator and lithographer. As an organizer of the Armory Show (1913) alongside Arthur B. Davies, he played an integral role in unveiling European modernism to the USA. While he painted landscapes of Maine, Cézanne-inspired still lifes and a series based on the American West, his expressive portraits of circus and vaudeville performers remain his best-known works.

In 1901, he trained at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but soon transferred to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich where he studied under Barbizon painter Heinrich von Zügel (1850–1941) until 1903. Upon returning to New York in 1903, he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Life and Puck, exhibited at the Salmagundi Club (1905) and organized artists’ balls for the Kit Kat Club. Working in an Impressionist style, he participated with Robert Henri in the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910)....

Ruled book used for recording accounts used by Native Americans in late 19th century as a paper source for colorful drawings. The emergence of ledger book art is considered to be a material culture link corresponding to the forced relocation of Plains tribes to government reservations in the 19th century. In the early 1860s Plains Indians acquired Western made papers in the form of ledger books and target books, as well as pens, watercolors, graphite and colored pencils, acquired through trade and as proceeds from battles with the American Army, in which they drew scenes that chronicled their experience and cultural traditions. During this early period, the demand for ledger book drawing was high among white settlers who viewed them as curiosities and souvenirs. Contemporary research on Plains Indians ledger book art is challenged by dispersed collections and the fragile and delicate material condition of ledger books due to poor quality paper and bindings. The dismantling of ledger books by art dealers seeking to gain economic profits is the largest threat to preserving these artworks and enabling future research on specific ledger book artists....

(Bainbridge)

(b Norristown, PA, July 5, 1864; d Philadelphia, PA, Nov 20, 1942).

American painter, illustrator and teacher. Born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, McCarter enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879, at the age of 15. Of the several hundred students who moved through the classes of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, none would move as far, stylistically and temperamentally, from their teacher as McCarter. Though later he would regard the five years he studied there as “years lost,” his training was sufficient to earn him a post drawing imagery for the Philadelphia Press.

In 1887 McCarter sailed to Europe for further studies under Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and an apprenticeship to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the medium of lithography. On his return to the United States, McCarter, grounded in the international style of graphic arts, settled in New York to a prosperous career and continued transatlantic travels as an illustrator for McClure’s, Harper’s, Century...

(b Petersburg, VA, March 20, 1867; d New York, NY, June 29, 1940).

American painter and illustrator. Raised by an invalid mother and largely absent father, Myers lived in Philadelphia, Trenton and Baltimore during his difficult childhood. He moved to New York City in 1881, where he found employment painting signs, interiors and theater screens. Myers began his formal artistic training at Cooper Union in 1887. A year later, he enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied for the next eight years. His most notable instructors were George de Forest Brush and Kenyon Cox, whom Myers described as conservative forces that he reacted against. By the mid-1890s, his artistic output largely consisted of drawings, pastels, watercolors and etchings. He was a fine draftsman who successfully captured the energy of the urban life that he observed in the Lower East Side and other working-class neighborhoods. Gallery owner William Macbeth encouraged him to turn his focus to oils in 1902. Myers subsequently exhibited his paintings at the Macbeth Gallery in ...

(b Wilmington, DE, March 5, 1853; d Florence, Nov 9, 1911).

American illustrator and writer. Along with such figures as Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Stanley Reinhart, Pyle was instrumental in raising American book and magazine illustration to a higher level, and inaugurating what is often termed the “Golden Age” of American illustration. Pyle was born in Wilmington, DE, counting among his ancestors some of the original Quaker settlers of the place. His mother, who encouraged his interest in literature, art and fantasy, introduced him to fairy tales, as well as to classic stories such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. After graduating from high school, Pyle attended a small private art academy in Philadelphia for three years, his only formal training. This was run by a Francis Adolf van der Wielen (b 1847), a graduate of the art academy in Antwerp, who was a stern taskmaster in matters of academic technique.

In 1876, Pyle produced an illustrated article on the wild horses of Chincoteague that was accepted by ...

American indexed catalog of building components and manufacturers published annually since 1906. This multi-volume series, which organizes building product information, details, and specifications, is a standard reference for architecture, engineering, and construction industry professionals. It was launched as “Sweet’s” Indexed Catalogue of Building Construction in 1906 by Clinton W. Sweet, founder and editor of the journal Architectural Record, in response to an industry need for a more systematic and scientific approach to the organization of building product data.

During the 19th century local and craft-based building traditions in the United States were gradually displaced by the rise of industrial production and the establishment of integrated transportation and distribution networks. The concomitant formation of a national market in building products, combined with new printing and marketing techniques, yielded an onslaught of manufacturers’ advertising brochures and catalogs inundating architects’ offices. By the early 20th century, this widely recognized “catalog problem” overwhelmed architects’ libraries and stymied the increasingly complex task of selecting and specifying building products. ...

The Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, St Louis, MO, is a research library for medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies that holds more than 37,000 manuscripts on microfilm from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. In addition, it holds microfilms of more than 2400 manuscripts from other libraries, 52,000 colour slides of manuscript illumination, and large collections of microfilmed Jesuit historical documents relating to the Order’s activities in the Americas and the Philippines. The library maintains an extensive reference collection of published manuscript catalogues and unpublished inventories for Vatican Library manuscripts, as well as manuscript catalogues for many other libraries, works on palaeography, codicology, and illumination, manuscript facsimiles, and other reference materials and periodicals to support the study of manuscripts and their texts.

The library was opened in 1953. Since 1957 it has published the journal Manuscripta: A Journal for Manuscript Research, which features articles and reviews on palaeography, codicology, illumination, library history, manuscript catalogues, text editing, and other subjects. Since ...

(b Decatur, GA, Nov 18, 1885; d Decatur, GA, Nov 13, 1967).

American architect. Georgia’s first registered female architecture, Wilburn designed single-family houses, two-family houses and apartments in the plan book tradition. Wilburn and Emily Elizabeth Holman were the only early 20th century female architects whose published plan books have been documented. A plan book was a catalog of building designs; each design, or stock plan, was represented on a single page with an exterior perspective line drawing or exterior photograph, a descriptive paragraph and a floor plan. Home builders who chose a plan and paid a fee received construction drawings in the mail. Wilburn produced at least ten plan books. As Atlanta grew, Wilburn’s houses defined whole suburbs, a sphere of influence that can be measured on the landscape with thousands of buildings from Atlanta’s center in 1910 outward to districts built in 1965, and encompassing small towns in the region.

A drafting apprenticeship from 1906 to 1907 with the Atlanta architectural firm, B. R. Padgett and Son who designed “fine residences” influenced Wilburn’s choice of domestic architecture as a specialty. In ...

American journal found in 1980. Woman’s Art Journal was founded in 1980 in Knoxville, TN, by the art historian Elsa Honig Fine and has been published biannually in May and November since that time. The inspiration for the journal came in part because other journals devoted to women and women’s art that had been started in the 1970s, such as Feminist Art Journal and Womanart, had ceased publication for various reasons despite their important contributions to the feminist art movement.

In its first issue, Fine indicated Woman’s Art Journal’s dual focus on “recording a hidden heritage” and the “reinterpretation of art history from our new awareness as women.” The first several issues of the journal fully reflect these areas of concentration. For example, women artists and critics, some of whom were well known and others hardly at all, had essays devoted to their work: Josephine Hopper, Anna Jameson, Louise Nevelson, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, and Katarzyna Kobro. Essays on broader issues important to women and women artists in these early issues focused on themes such as sexuality and maternity in the late 19th century, the use of nature as image and metaphor, and domestic madness in American art and poetry. Neither did the journal avoid controversial topics, devoting part of its second issue to Judy Chicago’s ...