The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that the papers of German–born American photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) are now available for study. They were transferred to the Library by the Princeton University Art Museum, to which Bernhard had bequeathed them. Bernhard is best known for her complex black-and-white photographs of still-lives and female nudes, in which she reimagined the relationship between photographer and model as one of identification rather than objectification. The resulting photographs provide a sensual rather than erotic image of the female body as an ideal form, similar to classical sculpture.  In 1927, after two years at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin studying art history and typography, Bernhard followed her father, graphic designer Lucian Bernhard (1883–1972), to New York City, where she worked as a commercial photographer. She was responsible for the photography in Machine Art (1934), the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition catalogue.

What would become a life-long study of the nude began in 1934 when Bernhard asked a dancer friend to pose in a large industrial stainless steel bowl. Her first photographic monograph, The Eternal Body (1986), a collection of fifty nudes, remains an influential work on nude photography. In 1935, after meeting her mentor, photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958), in Carmel, California, Bernhard became interested in the the work of West Coast photographers, such as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Minor White, and Wynn Bullock. After spending time in Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, where her first solo show appeared at the Jake Zeitlin Gallery in 1936, Bernhard moved to Carmel in 1944 and later settled in San Francisco in 1953. There she would reside for the rest of her life. Many of her best known photographs date from the 1950s and 1960s, including Classic Torso (1952), In the Box, Horizontal (1962), and Two Forms (1963). From 1961, Bernhard led workshops and courses at the University of California Extension Program, the Ansel Adams Workshops in Yosemite, the John Sexton Workshops in Carmel, as well as international master classes. Her printers Michael Kenna and Saïd Nuseibeh continued to produce prints from her negatives. Bernhard devoted herself increasingly to teaching photography after her near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning in the mid-1970s and remained active as an educator well into her 90s.

For a detailed description of Ruth Bernhard’s papers, one should access the finding aid at http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C1468  Bernhard’s 78 boxes of papers include correspondence, manuscripts, and artists proofs for published and unpublished books, publicity materials, teaching materials, appointment books, and a large series of memorabilia. There are informal photographs of Bernhard from childhood onwards, gifts and artwork from friends and students, personal effects, awards, and some audio and visual materials. Of note are a complete manuscript and several drafts of The Eye Beyond, an unpublished book  Bernhard began in the 1960s. It provides insight into her teaching methodologies and general philosophy of art. Also included are props and found objects used in teaching and still-life photography, including the cow skull with imbedded rosary pictured in her well-known Skull and Rosary (1945), dating from her days as a farmhand on the Pitney Farm in Mendham, N.J., during World War II.

For information about using the papers, contact rbsc@princeton.edu  The collection is stored offsite. Please consult with the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections about having materials recalled to Firestone Library, a process that normally takes 48–72 hours notice. Bernhard’s working library is in the Rare Books Division. For information about the Ruth Bernhard Archive at the Princeton University Art Museum, contact Katherine A. Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography, at kbussard@princeton.edu

Ruth Bernhard, 1957

Props for Skull and Rosary (1945)

On March 3, 1939, the celebrated American travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900-39), Class of 1921, set out in the Sea Dragon, his new 75-foot Chinese junk, on what would turn out to be his final adventure. Halliburton planned to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco, where the Golden Gate International Exposition was taking place. He hoped that the voyage of the Sea Dragon would serve as a show of American solidarity with China against Japanese military conquest at the beginning of World War II.

Among the many people who came to see the Sea Dragon at its Hong Kong mooring just before its ill-fated maiden voyage was a young Californian merchant marine and amateur photographer named Robert Pullen (1919-93), who had enjoyed reading many of Halliburton’s bestselling travel books, such as the Royal Road to Romance (1925). Pullen photographed the Sea Dragon with a Kodak-style folding camera and 2.5 x 4.25-inch black-and-white film. Unlike most views of the Sea Dragon, Pullen’s close-up view, never before seen, shows the junk’s stern, with the name Sea Dragon and home port of Hong Kong boldly emblazoned in Chinese characters below a yin-and-yang symbol. Further down, we see the large painted image of a phoenix, below which are a series of Chinese mythological scenes, including a phoenix and horses. The actual dragon can also be seen, painted on the side of the junk.

Just three weeks out to sea on March 23, the Sea Dragon sailed into a typhoon, lost radio contact, and disappeared. Later that year, Halliburton and his crew would eventually be declared lost at sea. But Pullen never forgot the excitement of seeing the Sea Dragon and being a witness to history. He kept the photographic negative and print for the rest of his life. Recently, his daughter Barbara Wilson, of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, thoughtfully donated the photo to the Princeton University Library so that it could be kept with the Richard Halliburton Papers (C0247), in the Manuscripts Division. The negative was scanned by Roel Muñoz in the Library’s digital studio to produce the image seen here. .

The Halliburton Papers include 20 linear feet of original materials documenting his life and writing, from his Lawrenceville School essay “Disillusioned,” through his Princeton University years, his years of worldwide travel, lecturing, and writing, to his posthumously-published “autobiography” of letters to his parents (1940). Autograph and/or typescript drafts of seven of his books–The Royal Road to Romance (1925), The Glorious Adventure (1927), New Worlds to Conquer (1929), The Flying Carpet (1932), Seven League Boots (1935), A Book of Marvels (1937), Second Book of Marvels (1938)–are present, as are some short stories, essays, and notes from his school days.

There are also passports, publishing contracts, memorabilia, maps, and newspapers clippings. Halliburton’s numerous letters to his parents (1919-1939) provide a vivid account of his travels, and they are supplemented with over 10 boxes of photographs of the exotic locales he visited, many of which were never published in his books. Correspondence of others includes letters from Devil’s Island prisoners (with some manuscripts). A large part of the papers consists of Halliburton’s research material for a biography of the British poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) that he never wrote: his correspondence with Brooke’s friends/acquaintances and summaries of interviews he had with them, as well as copies of Brooke’s works and correspondence, some clippings, and photographs. Here is a link to Halliburton papers finding aid: http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C0247

Halliburton’s Sea Dragon

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that Peter N. Heydon, Class of 1962, has made several important gifts, which are now on view in Firestone Library’s Eighteenth-Century Window. The first is the slant-topped mahogany writing desk of British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), on which she is known to have written her epic poem Aurora Leigh. In Browning’s “novel in verse,” she has a young Anglo-Italian woman tell her own story in blank verse: “Of writing many books there is no end; / And I who have written much in prose and verse / For others’ uses, will write now for mine.” Elizabeth penned Aurora Leigh in Florence, where she lived with poet and husband, Robert Browning (1812–89), from 1846 until her death fifteen years later. Her writing desk had been sent from England shortly after the Brownings’ arrival and was in the Drawing Room of the Brownings’ spacious Casa Guidi apartment, which they rented from 1847 on the second floor of the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi, Piazza San Felice, 8. The desk is depicted prominently, front and center, in an oil that Robert Browning commissioned from his friend, the Greek painter George Mignaty, the day after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death on July 1, 1861. Browning never returned to the Casa Guidi, so the painting was his remembrance of their happy and productive years in Florence. Along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing desk, Heydon has also given Robert Browning’s Northern Italian walnut table, also depicted in the Mignaty painting, as well as the Brownings’ silver-plated “traveling” tea kettle, made by Henry Wilkinson & Co., in Sheffield, England. These are the first of several anticipated gifts to Princeton from Heydon’s extensive collection of Browning first editions, manuscript letters, and other Victorian memorabilia collected over four decades by the donor.

English Department and Comparative Literature students will be able to view these three recently received objects together with other Browning items already in Princeton’s collections. Heydon’s association items were sold in 1913 by London-based auction house Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, following the death of the Browning’s son and heir Robert Wiedeman Barrett “Pen” Browning (1849–1912). At the 1913 sale, British writer Florence L. Barclay (1862–1921) high-bid the writing desk, table, and tea kettle (along with many other personal treasures). Other Browning holdings in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections include dozens of manuscripts and autograph letters, held in the Manuscripts Division, and an author’s proof for the second edition of Aurora Leigh (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857), incorporating handwritten emendations in Robertt Browning’s hand as well as a manuscript note by Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the verso of title page (Robert Taylor Collection, Rare Books Division). These proofs served as setting copy for the first American edition of Aurora Leigh (New York: Francis & Co., 1857).

Peter N. Heydon first became enchanted with the poetry of Robert Browning as a Princeton undergraduate, while studying under English Professor Edward Dudley Hume Johnson. Heydon’s enthusiasm for the Victorians took him to The University of Michigan, earning both a MA (1963) and PhD (1970), studying with, among others, Professor Robert Super, Princeton Class of 1935. Heydon taught English Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Michigan between 1963 and 1986 on the faculties of both the English Department and Humanities Department. He is the founding President of The Browning Institute, Inc., based in New York and Florence, which acquired the Brownings’ Casa Guidi apartment in 1971; and for fifteen years as the Institute’s President oversaw the fifteen-room restoration of the apartment as a Museum and study center. It is presently owned and operated, like the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, by Eton College and the British National Trust. Heydon has authored a number of pieces on Robert Browning and his circle for Browning Institute Studies; and he was co-editor with Philip Kelly of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849–1861: With Recollections by Mrs. Ogilvy (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1973). He continues to reside in Ann Arbor with his wife of forty-five years, horsewoman and humaniac Rita Montgomery Heydon.

For more information, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: dcskemer@princeton.edu

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Writing Desk.