We have rather a good scanner at the office which gives us the option of receiving material digitally or of originating scans ourselves - transparencies, items in private collections, our own archives and out of print books were all scanned for September. This printed issue looks good, but was challenging and difficult to put together, with pictures from around thirty different sources, including several foreign museums. Paintings were specially photographed across the world. Is this unusual? To such an extent it is; so how come?

As soon as I read the five main articles (back in June for final picture selection early in July), I could see they weren’t straightforward. Some were of course. Peter Barber had already collected wonderful material over the years (including old postcards and illustrated magazines) for Pazzi, so although I needed to persuade the Museum of London to photograph the huge Ticinese conservative party banner in their collection, that article was mainly sorted by scanning a variety of the author’s unique originals. But pictures for some of the other articles were going to require individual time-consuming attention because my usual sources simply had nothing on their websites specific enough, or even remotely related. 

Distribution of Maize by Stefan Luchian

National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest

Markus Bauer wrote about the 1907 Romanian peasants’ revolt with particular reference to local paintings. Hmmm. Not many Romanian paintings in this country, especially ones about something so specific. The author suggested local artists of the period so this was clearly a case for the Courtauld’s Witt Library, where picture references (prints and tearsheets) of art from 1200 are filed under the names of some 50,000 artists in box files and shelved by national school of painting. ‘Romanian painting’ is a couple of shelves in a dimly lit corner where I selected two paintings to pursue as high resolution scans for printing. The first hurdle was to ring the Bucharest galleries to identify the right person to help. Impressively on their part, as all conversations and emails were in English, both scans arrived from Romania as we went to press.