Thursday, January 1, 2015

Happy New Year or, Welcoming 2015 with a riddle

Thursday, January 1, 2015
CR Wright, Happy New Year
Loretta reports:

Happy New Year!

2015 will bring a new book from Isabella Bradford, some celebratory events from Loretta Chase, and the historical nerdiness you’ve learned to love or at least tolerate in our blog.

To start the New Year off in the nerdy spirit, I invite you to a not-too-difficult (I hope) sleuthing expedition.

Today it’s a Happy New Year card by an artist who’ll be familiar to some of you.  Since my nerdiness does not extend to paleoart (and a great many other topics), Charles R. Knight was a discovery for me.  Not that I would have connected this sprightly watercolor with his more famous work.  Circuses was what first came to mind.  Then I finally deciphered the words.  I’ll let you decipher them, and see if you can determine what and where the “new building” of 1922 was.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to view at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

5 comments:

Gehayi said...

I think that it might be the Childs Frick Building in the inner courtyard of The American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York. The AMNH uses Childs Frick as a storage facility for many of its dinosaurs and fossils.

http://images.library.amnh.org/hiddencollections/tag/charles-knight/

And this photograph looks right, even if it's from the wrong angle.

http://cdn-us-ec.yottaa.net/5098039f4707e64aa6001dc0/www.frick.org/v~b.7e/sites/default/files/styles/1927_slideshow/public/slideshow/HCFFP000034_POST.jpg?itok=2QV18wgC&yocs=_&yoloc=us

Julsie1231 said...

And I'm thinking it's the museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Unknown said...

I was able to zoom in on the banners to see the text:

"The Dinosaur Family"
"At last
Our Housing Problem
is solved"

I have yet to figure out which museum opened a new building or moved to a new one. Guessing the ANHM (What Gehayi said)

norjunma1 said...

I doubt it's the FMNH in Chicago. She's a huge, white neoclassical that opened to the public in 1921, and Knight's relationship with them didn't start until later that decade. My vote's for the Frick building.

LorettaChase said...

Like other commenters, I deduced it was the Frick building at the AMNH in NYC. All the evidence points that way, and I'm sticking with the conclusion until somebody at AMNH says we're mistaken.

 
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