James Reed Print Collection Rehousing Project

FAIN: PG-266608-19

Fairfield University (Fairfield, CT 06824-5195)
Carey Weber (Project Director: January 2019 to April 2025)

The purchase of preservation supplies and environmental monitoring equipment for a recently-acquired collection of over 700 prints by leading French nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, and Odilon Redon. The prints encompass a wide range of subject matter and artistic expression, touching on still-life, portraiture, caricature, literary subjects, industrialization, urbanization, class and gender issues, and leisure pursuits. This collection and others at Fairfield University Art Museum are incorporated into interdisciplinary teaching, exhibits, and publications.

The Fairfield University Art Museum received a major gift of 700 19th-century French lithographs and etchings in 2017. The collection includes prints by preeminent artists, including Géricault, Delacroix, Daumier, Manet, Redon, and Fantin-Latour. Also included in the gift are 35 old master engravings, etchings and woodcuts by northern European artists. Prints have always been appreciated as primary source material in the humanities—their imagery and subject matter intimately relate to specific historical currents and events and literary themes and genres. The Reed Collection is extraordinary but the prints are not properly housed. This new Preservation Assistance Grant will allow us to re-house each print into archival solander boxes, placed into storage cabinets in our storeroom, with new dataloggers in place to actively monitor the room’s temperature and humidity.