Month 15 (September 2012)
This month I have been mostly... Puzzling over pictures
I’ve finally finished cataloguing the loose pictures, which was no easy task. Usually when cataloguing you have the physical material as your starting point, so you can see what you’ve got, and you assign reference numbers and create records for each item as you work through. I couldn’t do this with the pictures, because the majority aren’t stored in the Library with the rest of the Butler Collection, but are hanging on walls around the College (many in private rooms). Without access to the pictures themselves, I’ve had to collate information from a number of older databases and catalogues, in order to work out which pictures we should have, which ones we do actually have (and where they are now), and how best to describe them for the benefit of interested parties and future Library staff wanting to locate them.
'Eynsford, Kent', by Samuel Butler (oil on canvas)
My major source of information has been the 1921 catalogue prepared by Henry Festing Jones, who donated the Samuel Butler Collection to St John’s in the first place. But I couldn’t rely completely on Jones’s catalogue. Some of the pictures he mentions there never actually made it to the College (the oil painting of ‘Montreal, Canada, from the Mountain’, no. 29, for example); some I have already catalogued elsewhere, because they are now part of a boxed collection; and some of Butler's paintings were never part of the initial Festing Jones donation, but came into the Library's collection later by other means, so were never included in Jones’s catalogue. In the case of all but three pictures the information now marries up – so I will continue to puzzle out the queries, and in the meantime the updated catalogue is available here!
Portrait of Henry Festing Jones, by Samuel Butler (oil on canvas)
We also had visits this month from two groups of Year 10 and 11 students from Lancashire, who took on the challenge of becoming curators for an hour and really impressed me with their plans for exhibitions of items from the Butler Collection. Having walked through the Library door with no knowledge whatsoever of Samuel Butler, the students quickly got to grips with Butler’s life, work and interests, and came up with creative and insightful titles for potential exhibitions, including ‘The Artistic Tourist’, ‘Evolution, Old and New’, ‘The Adventures of Samuel Butler’, and ‘An Explorer’s Art’. My favourite, though, has to be ‘A Sam of All Trades’, which highlights the diversity of Butler’s talents and interests, his capacity for hard work, his commitment to pursuing his ideas, and his adventurous, creative spirit – all in a super pun. I’m sure Butler would have approved.
Self Portrait, 1878, by Samuel Butler (oil on canvas)