Drawing From Life is a selection of caricatures and cartoons from the American Art / Portrait Gallery (AA/PG) Library Collection at the Smithsonian Libraries. The volumes in the AA/PG date from 1800.
They appear to have digitized portions of 11 books by 11 different artists…and this makes up the entire online exhibition. They chose artists whose illustrations contained a cross section of popular themes like golf, travel, and the US Congress. With over 600 volumes of cartoons to choose from, it must have been difficult to choose only 11 books.
The online exhibition can be explored by book/artist, subject, or viewed all at once. There is no search function. The design has some odd elements like a link to the home page at the very bottom of the left hand navigation. It also contains a broken link in the main navigation.
Individual cartoons can be slightly enlarged, though not quite to the point of readability in some cases. They are saved as low-res jpegs at 72 dpi.
Each object is labeled with author, date, title, caption, book, and the list of subjects assigned to the image. The subjects are like tags and should be hyperlinked to other images with the same tags but they are not.
The most useful page on the site is probably the credits, which lists the digital imaging information. The scans were captured originally as TIFFs at 300 dpi. They used a Hasselblad 35mm camera and an Epson Perfection flatbed scanner. It says they reduced the images to 750 pixels on the short side and reduced them to 256 colors for web display.
Because this is such a puny collection that can barely be considered a representative sample of the AA/PG’s collection of cartoons, and because the images can barely be read (let alone studied), and because the design is so displeasing and the usability so lacking, I predict that this collection’s audience is no one (except maybe for digitization students looking for exhibitions to pick on).
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