• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Regarding your Robert Engel from previously, there’s a whole load of artists historically, who have virtually no information about them. If they weren’t famous whilst alive, who would bother to write down a biography at the time? Afterwards, you’re left with researching records from census, school, sales, newspapers, possible living relatives etc.

    A lot of museums and galleries with permanent collections have 3 to 50 times as much stuff in stores as is on display. You’re not allowed to get rid of anything, but any year, you might receive another truck-load of badly labelled and badly maintained artworks from some rich bloke’s private collection, or someone’s tax write-off. You’d have to choose which ones get processed or researched first (after the existing backlog). Sometimes the information just isn’t there though - that’s why you get all those works that just get labelled “Unknown Man with a blue hat, likely Dutch School, circa 1650s”.

    I think the information and documentation of such things is actually getting better, compared to pre-internet, certainly - but yeah, some people will have no information, and some will have information, but it’s still in a paper folder, waiting for someone to type it up :)





  • It looks like one of those “vague, unsure” ones, it’s perhaps too old a word, and with too many vague, possible sources.

    Some bits of dictionaries suggest various etymologies - it likely drifted from words in Gaelic, Scots, Arabic and French, like “jupe”, “jump”, “juppe” “jubbe” and so on, which tended to mean things like “smock”, “jacket” or whatever. It’s been around in English for various clothing types for a few hundred years, and referred specifically to the woollen pullover thing from the picture above for 100-150 years.

    It has no relation at all to jump as in “leap”.