Salutations!
I originally posted this within the discussion board environment for my INFO 5300 Organization of Information class in Fall 2022.
As Joudrey and Taylor (2018) stated “the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC [has made its] entire collection (drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures)… searchable… [and] allows the public to search the collection’s ‘object records’ by… [many] fields” (pp. 120-121). Intrigued, I poked around this afternoon on the NGA “Search Collection” tab to see what was available and how the system worked, especially what information it might give and how search terms had to be inputted to get desired outputs. All my searches were limited to images offered online since I chose to check the “Images only: check to limit your search to objects for which images are available” box.
I first started looking for anything in the “Key words in object information” box for my favorite actress/comedienne Gracie Allen, hoping to find a new-to-me photograph, to no avail, so I switched to looking for her name in the “Key words in title” box. Nothing. I abandoned the idea of Gracie photos and moved to Impressionist painters, since I was on the NGA website after all. I tried both Mary Casset and Mary Cassett, in first-last order without success, so I plugged in merely Degas and found the entry for one of my favorites: “The Dance Class” (see below; as the image is in the public domain, I was able to download it from NGA to repost here. Isn’t it lovely?). Incidentally, I misspelled the first painter’s surname incorrectly — Mary Cassatt, apparent by some Degas sketches/etchings of her at the Louvre surfacing in my results.
Degas’ painting “The Dance Class”
Examination of information provided for “The Dance Class” yielded a veritable treasure trove. I discovered in its exhibition history that it was first shown in London at the Deschamps Gallery in April 1876 as no. 131 (National Gallery of Art, n.d.), whatever that meant to the gallery at the time; the following year, it arrived in Paris as no. 38 and was featured as part of “La 3e Exposition de Peinture [Third Impressionist Exhibition]” (NGA, n.d.). Recently, the painting traveled in 2019 to Paris as no. 219 (National Gallery of Art, n.d.); NGA published about the exhibition, Degas at the Opéra, which was a collaboration between curators at the NGA and the Musée d’Orsay to “[celebrate] the 350th anniversary of the [Paris] Opéra’s founding… [and presented] approximately 100 of [Degas’] best-known and beloved works” (National Gallery of Art, 2020, para. 2).
The image description below provided by NGA is gorgeous; its beautifully rich detail reminds me of how Mary Ingalls would ask Laura to see out loud for her in By the Shores of Silver Lake.
A dimly lit ballet studio is filled with about two dozen young dancers tying on their shoes, stretching, or practicing en pointe in this horizontal painting. The girls all wear dance costumes with knee length tutus, tight bodices, and belts in canary yellow, rose pink, or royal blue. The girls all have brown or dark blond hair. The room seems to be mostly lit from windows on the wall opposite us so some of the girls’ faces are in shadow, but all appear to have light skin. Starting from the left, two dancers are visible from the waist down as they descend a spiral staircase that rises along the left edge of the canvas and off the top. To our left of center is a knot of several dancers, two of whom stand on their toes en pointe, with arms raised. Further right and closest to us, four dancers cluster around a mahogany-brown bench. Rose-pink ballet slippers are piled next to a seated dancer wearing a scarlet-red jacket over her costume. Her head is turned to our right, looking at the girl standing next to her. On the other side of the bench, another dancer bends over to reach her feet, presumably tying on her slippers. The fourth stands on the far right with her back to us, her head turned to our left to look back at the central group. More dancers practice in a room beyond, seen through a wide, squared opening in the upper right of the composition. The room we seem to be in has dark olive-green walls and the room beyond has brighter, parchment-yellow walls. The faces and some details of the costume are loosely painted so their features are indistinct. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, “Degas.”
RLGing,
Sarah Hope
References
Joudrey, D. N. & Taylor, A. G. (with Wisser, K. M.). (2018). The organization of information (4th ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
National Gallery of Art. (n.d.). The dance class, c. 1873 [Register Entry]. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.165300.html
National Gallery of Art. (2020). Degas at the Opéra. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2020/degas-opera.html