Part 583: Background Painters, Luminous-Lint
Here is a little sidestep from the life and times of Thomas G. Moses. Occasionally while looking for information online, I discover a site, that takes me by surprise. Here was one that I uncovered while looking for information about advertising curtains by the Kansas City Scenic Co.
It was an advertisement for the Kansas City Scenic Co. that drew me into a series of photographs depicting scenic artists from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The images were part of an online collection called Luminous-Lint and the artists were categorized as “Painters of backgrounds.”
If you are unfamiliar with the Luminous-Lint, this is one site to bookmark. It contains 85,989 photographs from 3,278 different collections around the world. The creators mission is to create “detailed and well structured histories of photography.” The site includes “1,031 distinct, but interlinked, histories of photography that are evolving on a regular basis.” The creators report that their site is used worldwide by curators, educators, photo historians, collectors and photographers to better understand the many histories of photography.
My interest in the contents has little to do with the photographers or history of photography; I am interested in the subject matter. My interest lies with not only the scenic artists with paint palettes, buckets, and brushes, by also the performers and tradesmen.
One of the collections features David Knights-Whittome. Here is the information about the collection on Luminous-Lint: “About 1978 a collection of around 11,000 glass plate negatives was found in the basement of Linwood Strong’s shop (Optician) on the High Street in Sutton, a town in South London. The plates had been stored there in deteriorating conditions for over 60 years, they were saved and eventually became a part of Sutton Archives, South London, England. They were stored but not made available until 2014 when a preservation and digitization project commenced. The photographer was little-known David Knights-Whittome and the portraits provide a time capsule of Late Victorian and early Edwardian England. The collection included images of studio backgrounds, a photograph of David Knights-Whittome standing on a step ladder and posed as if he was painting a backdrop, and a notebook with a sketch for a background that he had drawn as a teenager in the 1890s.”
Many of the photographers also worked as scenic artists, creating painted backings of various sizes and subjects.
Here is a link to the “background artists” category: http://www.luminous-lint.com/__phv_app.php?/f/_studios_backgrounds_painters_01/ I really recommend taking a peak at this site.
To be continued…
