Spring approximately 1939: The Brooklyn Museum has placed on exhibition a group of facsimile reproductions of prints and drawings illustrating the history of costume from the 15th Century through the 19th Century. This exhibition is designed to call attention to the collections of the Brooklyn Museum Library and to the facilities for research and study there. Some designers and schools are already using the very comprehensive resources of the General Art Reference Library, and there has been a marked increase in the number of special students working in the Charles Edwin Wilbour Memorial Library of Egyptology. The Library collections are also heavily used by the educational staff of the Museum. There has, however, been no previous opportunity to call the attention of the general public to the very rich resources of the Library in plates and other illustrative material. A series of Library exhibitions are planned to demonstrate these resources.
Four Illustrated books and nineteen separate plates are included in the exhibition. The books are: Ackermann’s “Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashion,” published in 1811; Gamba’s “Voyage dans la Russe Meridionale," published in 1826, showing a Georgian Princess in street costume; “The Catalogue of the Widener Collection of 18th Century Engravings,” showing a reproduction of an engraving by Joseph de Longuelli; and Jacquemin's "Iconographie genérale et Methodique du costume," showing two Italian knights of the 15th Century.
The plates exhibited are: One engraving by Lucas van Leyden; four drawings by Hans Holbein, the younger; one drawing by Albrecht Durer; one drawing by Rubens, “Study for the portrait of Helen Fourment"; one drawing by Hans Baldung Grien; one engraving by Crispin de Passe, “Portrait of Queen Elizabeth”; one engraving by Bartolozzi after Reynolds; one engraving by John Raphael Smith after Romney; one drawing by Jean André Portail; two pages from a Paris Fashion Magazine of 1828; one drawing by Constantin Guys; one drawing by Toulouse-Lautrec; two miniatures from René Duc d’Anjou’s “Le Cuer d’Amours Espris” and one origina1 lithograph by Toulouse-Lautrec in "Pan."
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1939. 01-03/1939, 096.
