Studio Tour: Yale Peabody Museum
Thursday October 17th
2-4pm
Join us as Andy Todd, Imaging and Recording Studio Manager, offers us a tour of the studio spaces at the Peabody Museum.
Space is limited so please get in touch with John ffrench if you are interested in attending.
June 20, 2024 at 2:30 PM
The Lens Media Lab, Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, is pleased to host a presentation by Rick Johnson:
“Dating Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings Using Watermark Matches: New Methods for Watermark Imaging, Comparison & Searchable Libraries”
Whitney Humanities Center, 320 York St. RM L01
This talk introduces a digital approach to address the long-standing desire of art historians to connect the analysis of Old Master drawings with the watermarks found in their laid paper supports. Use of digital tools for watermark identification, comparison, and dating is illustrated on drawings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Lievens, Claes Cornelisz, Moyaert, Philips Wouwerman, and other Dutch artists. The use of a new low-cost, rapid watermark imaging system (WImSy), co-designed and built by Paul Messier (Lens Media Lab, Yale University) is presented as the device making the collection of a comprehensive watermark library feasible.
“Technical art history has been one of the most promising areas of tool development in recent years, thanks largely to the work of engineers and computer scientists like C. Richard Johnson, Jr. Johnsonand his collaborators have pioneered new methods …, which have the potential to revolutionize the study of works on canvas and works on paper. The tools that they have produced are highly specialized in their functions, but potentially applicable to millions of works on canvas and paper.” (A. Brey, “Digital art history in 2021,” History Compass, 2021).
C. Richard (Rick) Johnson, Jr. is the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University. During the last fourteen of his forty years on the faculty at Cornell, and the three years since his retirement from Cornell, he has focused his research on the emerging field of computational art history. His approach has been to apply his engineering background in digital signal processing to the advancement of art history scholarship. The primary focus has been on development and application of digital tools for hunting and confirming matches of manufactured patterns in art supports, in particular the canvas of paintings and the laid paper of prints and drawings of European Old Masters. Johnson is lead editor of Counting Vermeer: Using Weave Maps to Study Vermeer’s Canvases.