Announcements

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives Announces Online Access to Artist Obituary Scrapbooks

June 4, 2024

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives is pleased to announce the digitization of two volumes of artist obituaries from our archives, spanning the years between 1906 to 1929. The volumes were aggregated by Arthur D'Hervilly, who started his Met career as a guard in 1894 and worked his way up through the ranks to assistant curator of paintings.

The Met has long collected articles about its exhibitions and programs, milestone art acquisitions, gallery expansions, and activities of its trustees, benefactors, and staff; D'Hervilly's collection of artist obituaries add an unexpected facet to the Museum's substantial press clipping archive. He continued to acquire these materials and grow the collection until his own death in 1919. After his passing, other Museum staff followed his lead for another decade, amassing hundreds more obituaries. Some of the artists included in these volumes are well-known, but they include mostly obscure painters, sculptors, commercial illustrators, and photographers.

The obituaries were pasted into two large scrapbook volumes that grew to contain more than 300 densely packed pages, which were photographed by Museum Archives staff. Digital access to these materials allows online readers to page through these fragile books, that are otherwise a challenge to handle.

Information on the project can be found here, and the digitized volumes are available through Watson Library Digital Collections, here.

Researchers are required to use digitized material for their initial access to the collection. Requests for access to original material will be reviewed a case by case basis. For information about access to the physical materials at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, please email archives@metmuseum.org.

For general information about archival research at the Met, and other digital collections of historical records, please visit our webpage.