Louisa Wyatt Truscott Album
The Louisa Wyatt Truscott Album is a bound album comprised of various sketches. The inside cover holds a poem which begins “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, stop for a minute and look at my Album so handsome and new / Be so kind as to write or to draw something in it / A verse or a figure a flower or a view…" She began collecting sketches for the album in 1859 according to the hand drawn title page. Although the album was started in 1859, several of the sketches date much earlier.
The sketches collected in this album are from a variety of artists, some signed and dated, some captioned. The sketches are mostly done in pencil or ink, some are watercolor and some are sketched over gradient-colored paper making clever use of the blue-to-brown gradient to serve as sky and earth backgrounds.The style of these images range from portraits to still-life , cartoons to highly detailed drawings filled with thousands of cross hatches, as well as completed full-scene pieces to unfinished half-painted sketches.
The subjects of these paintings and sketches are mainly people, either as portraits or of the subjects posed. A handful of paintings in the album are still-life flower arrangements and a number of the pencil-sketched landscape scenes are of ships sailing in a harbor or on the open ocean. The captions are primarily written in English, but a few are in French, Arabic, or Croatian.
Although no painting boasts Louisa’s signature, a sampling of works are addressed to her in the form of whimsical paintings on doilies attached to pages of the album. One reads “A Louise Pour sa Fete” (To Louise, for your party), while another says “restous tou jours unies par l’amitie / To my friend Louisa” (Always united by Friendship). Also included in the album is an inscription first in Arabic, then translated to Romanized Arabic, then in English. The romanized transcription reads "Makarhsse el youin, hisbeerfel Kredra halla kebir!", translated to "Never mind to-day, wait for to morrow! The Lord is great!"
- Conditions Governing Access
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The collection is open for research.
- Dates
- Creation: 1859-1865
- Extent
- 0.20 Linear Feet
- Related Names
- Truscott, Louisa Wyatt (Louisa Wyatt Truscott Timpson)
- Language of Materials
- English
- Dates
- created: 1859-1865