Re: Pond-moonrise (was: Re: Steichen image in April's 'Vanity Fair'

[Jack Brubaker <jack@jackbrubaker.com>]

It seems that a print that had held up well from early in the century till the Chicago show (80 years) and has been in storage in an archival setting since then would be unlikely to have changed a whole lot since the Art Institute show.

Jack

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com> wrote:

Jack, ordinarily I would agree with you in general on this point, but in this case, where we have three eyewitnesses on the list who saw the Met's  print in Chicago in 1989 and were so struck with it that they still remember it,   reporting that they remember the sky as a deep blue or deep teal-blue,  and also we have the Met's conservator's report that the pigments used to color the print were yellow and blue-green, I'd say the circumstantial evidence points to the surmise that originally, all three prints were (roughly) similarly colored.

Besides, if the print had looked 20 years ago as it does on the Met site now,

http://tinyurl.com/dyarrc

I have a hard time believing that it would have captured people's imagination to the extent that they still remember it 20 years later.

I've checked the dates on these, and interestingly, the platinum with applied coloring (the Met print) was made in 1903; the gum over platinum and the cyanotype over platinum were made the next year, in 1904.   For whatever that's worth.
Katharine