In 1906, an assistant curator of paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art began collecting current newspaper obituaries of recently deceased artists. Arthur D’Hervilly, who started his Met career as a guard in 1894 and worked his way up through the ranks, was preparing a checklist of American paintings and helping senior curators to revise a catalogue of the entire Met picture collection. D’Hervilly likely began to gather artist obituaries because they included basic biographical information about contemporary artists represented in the Met catalogues.
His main source for obituaries was the National Press Intelligence Co. clippings bureau. Their staff read hundreds of daily papers each day, bearing in mind personal names, terms, and concepts requested by customers. Articles containing target phrases were clipped and delivered to subscribers who had requested specific searches. The Met had for many years received from National Press Intelligence batches of clippings related to the Museum itself—articles about its exhibitions and programs, milestone art acquisitions, gallery expansions, and activities of its trustees, benefactors, and staff.
D’Hervilly’s standing order for artist obituaries added an unusual dimension to the Museum’s substantial press clipping archive. He continued to acquire batches until his own death in 1919. Then other Museum staff followed his lead for another decade, amassing hundreds more obituaries. The obituaries were pasted into two large scrapbook volumes that grew to contain more than 300 densely packed pages. These scrapbooks were for many years held by the Museum’s Watson Library, and were transferred to the Met Archives around 2010.
The first volume spans 1906-1915, while the second covers the years 1915-1929. Artists include painters, sculptors, commercial illustrators, and photographers. Some were world famous, like Auguste Rodin, but most were little-known. Tabloid reporting of the era sensationalized deaths by violence, bizarre accidents, poverty, or suicide, adding a macabre dimension to the collection.
Unfortunately, thousands of obituaries were folded by Met staff before they were glued to the pages, and many were placed on top of one another. Moreover, newspapers of the time were printed on poor quality paper which has deteriorated over time. Sadly, it is impossible to unfold and read many of the obituaries in the scrapbooks without causing irreparable damage, so the original volumes are not available for research or browsing.
To provide some level of access to this remarkable collection, Museum Archives staff photographed every page of both volumes, leaving folded clippings just as they lie on the pages. This digital representation of the scrapbooks allows online readers to page through the entire collection, to read complete obituaries when they are visible (especially on the first pages of volume 1) and to glean an impression of the contents of the most densely packed and damaged pages (prevalent in volume 2). In some cases, news articles that can be viewed here only in truncated form can be found and read in their entirety in online databases of historical newspapers, like the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection.
For additional information about Arthur D’Hervilly and the creation of the artist obituary scrapbooks, see Deaths of Artists (Blast Books, 2024) by former Met Managing Archivist Jim Moske.
Above: Artist Obituary Scrapbook, Volume 2, 1915-1929, pages 54-55 including November 1917 clippings regarding Auguste Rodin, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.
