#princetonarts

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Engraving of Nassau Hall, 1850.

Nassau Hall Iconography Collection (AC177), Box 1, Folder 17.

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Throwback Thursday: A series of murals by artist William Yarrow in 1935 once adorned the Trophy Room in Princeton University's gymnasium. All that remains of them, following a fire in 1944, are photographs. Here is a representation of a baseball game from the mural series.

Joseph Raycroft Papers (AC146), Box 7, Folder 7

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West Meets East: Japanese Themes in Princeton’s Graphic Arts of the Late 19th Century

If you spend as much time immersed in the University Archives as I do, at times you will see intriguing patterns emerge. I have seen repeated examples of an unusual theme in the graphic arts associ…

In the last half of the 19th century, the Western world became obsessed with Japan. Princeton was no exception, as April C. Armstrong *14 explains:

“The overall positive tone in the sources about Japan and Japanese people from the writings of the Western students and the general openness to the West expressed by the Japanese students I’ve found suggests that the imagery was intended to be positive as well. However, we might view it more critically today, just as we would the other depictions of nonwhite peoples in Princeton’s graphic arts of the same era.”

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Where silent movement became audible, you had sound and fury signifying nothing.

Princeton University instructor of dramatic art Robert H. Ball, in the Princeton Herald, lamenting the end of the silent film, July 31, 1931

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Illustration from the front page of Gleason's Pictorial, August 6, 1853. Only a few years later, Princeton’s Nassau Hall would suffer extensive damages in a fire, and repairs in the latter part of the 1850s would enlarge the cupola and add towers to flank the structure on either end; many of these changes were reversed in the 20th century.

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This program for The Golden Dog, a show put on by the Triangle Club of Princeton University, is from the first show ever performed at McCarter Theatre (February 20, 1930).

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Princeton University’s first art museum was built in 1880. It sat on the site of the current art museum (McCormick Hall), which replaced it in 1966.

Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series (AC111), Box SP05, Image No. 1216.

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For more on the Princeton and Slavery Project, please visit slavery.princeton.edu.

For more on the arts at Princeton University, check out @artsatprinceton.