Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
A miniature
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Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Manuscripts
This collection contains research files of English art historian R. B. Beckett, chiefly consisting of study photographs and clippings collected from the late 1940s to early 1960s documenting the works of John Constable and other English artists including William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, J. M. W. Turner, and Richard Wilson. In addition there are also images and clippings related to English portraiture, as well as sporting and comic images. The artist research files contain study art photographs and clippings, with some occasional correspondence and notes and manuscripts by Beckett. Six artists (Blake, Constable, Gainsborough, Rowlandson, Turner, and Wilson) are distinguished as their own subseries, and their files typically contain study photographs, article clippings, some scattered manuscripts and correspondence, and exhibition catalogues. The largest of these are the John Constable files (Boxes 3-9), which includes seven boxes of study images. Other art images in the collection are arranged either in the "Artists (various)" subseries (Box 13) or in the "Portrait artists" subseries (Boxes 14-15). While some of the images are professional photographs acquired from museums, most of the images are clippings from British magazines such as The Connoisseur and Burlington. Most of the images are not annotated or only contain brief handwritten identifications typically of the artist, painting title, date, dimensions, etc. Overall there are very few manuscripts by Beckett in the collection. Exceptions consist of a sketchbook from the late 1920s containing pencil sketches of landscapes by Beckett and a few documents. The correspondence is chiefly from galleries, museums, and publishers related to Beckett's research and publications.
mssBeckett
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Visual Materials
The Fanchon & Marco collection contains approximately 1400 photographs depicting hundreds of Fanchon and Marco Inc. sets and performers between approximately 1925 and 1938. The collection also includes three boxes of ephemera, dated from around 1912 to 1940, that consist of newspapers clippings, musical scores, miscellaneous photographs, and the supplemental press books that were included with Fanchon & Marco's promotional magazine, Now (later The Idea), dating from 1930 and 1931. The 16 volumes (now disbound) of photographs in this collection served as a visual inventory for hundreds of Fanchon & Marco sets and performers. The images document the actors, dancers, costumes, sets, and concepts and appear to have been primarily photographed during rehearsals before the shows premiered in Los Angeles theaters such as Loew's State Theater and the Paramount Theater. The first volume contains some photographs presumably taken in San Francisco and later volumes include a few photographs by New York-based photographers. Photographers represented in the collection are: Archer's Art Shop of Los Angeles; Hollywood photographers Irving Archer; Archer's Studios; Curt Fox; Paralta Studios; and Harry Wenger. A few photographs include the imprints of Peerless Photo of Los Angeles, John Sirgio, H.W. Steward of San Francisco, Talbot of New York, Weaver of Los Angeles, and White Studio of New York.
photCL 487