The Met is excited to announce the
release of more documents from its collection of Ernst Herzfeld Papers. In
November, the department of Islamic Art released 200+ drawings and watercolors
of Samarra Finds made by Herzfeld after his 1911-1913 excavations at the site.
These can be accessed through the Watson Library’s digital collections website.
 |
| The Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh1037 |
The most interesting thing about
these documents to me is that they give us an idea of Herzfeld’s working
process. We know from extant photographs in the Archives of the Freer and Sackler and
at the Met that Herzfeld photographed many of the fragments of wall paintings
and carved stucco wall ornament he found on site. He also made watercolors of
them in sketchbooks, either on site or perhaps after he left. One sketchbook is
at the Met, not digitized yet, under the inventory number eeh1672.
At some point, Herzfeld also made
sketches of the fragments on individual sheets of paper (both tracing paper and
thicker, construction paper). He would cut these out to replicate the shape of
the fragment, sometimes piecing them together to form reconstructions by gluing
them to a larger piece of paper.
Many of these cut-outs and reconstructions
eventually became color prints in Die Malereien von Samarra.
 |
| The Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh1154. |
Another exciting aspect of the
digitization of this material is the potential to compare Herzfeld’s sketches
and watercolors to the real fragments virtually. Now that the V&A has its
painting fragments online and the British Museum and Museum für Islamische
Kunst in Berlin are following suit, it will be possible to put a sketch and a
preserved fragment together side by side, in color, on one’s desktop.
Take a moment to compare the Met’s
sketch eeh1111 to its plaster counterpart at the V&A, a fragment with the
accession number A.36-1922, shown below. It is interesting to note that Herzfeld's drawings, while mostly accurate, cannot replicate something
elusive about the Samarra Wall Paintings, which I would describe as a carefree
approach toward line: outlines blur and cross over one another in an
almost impressionistic manner in some of these fragments.
We hope to have another batch of Samarra Finds documentation out soon: this next upload will feature a series of sketches of carved plaster architectural panels.
Matt Saba, Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art
