Audio version

Read by Christopher Williams

Text version

On Thursdays we have an evening shift for those volunteers who can’t participate during work hours. Sarah, our Volunteer Coordinator, is here for that shift but I am not, so on Friday morning I go through the Capture One sessions to see what the team’s been up to. It’s so impressive: the images the volunteers create are just fantastic, they all learn so fast and their contribution to the project is amazing.

This morning I came in and looked at the last image they took. They were digitising 17 x 22cm glass negatives from the Kersting archive and this one shows a very ornate chinoiserie bedroom.

Before the project started, in order to find out more about the bedroom I would have had to go through Anthony Kersting’s ledgers, find the right entry, and decipher his handwriting – which is something I am particularly bad at – but now, thanks to our volunteers’ efforts, all I need to do is search for the negative number in their transcription.

According to Kersting, this is a picture of Lady Fitzwilliam’s bedroom in Milton House, which he took the 10th of November 1959. Further research reveals that the building’s name is in fact Milton Hall, and that there aren’t many images of it available online. So here is a preview of what is to come once the Courtauld’s  photographic collections become available on our website: zooming into the image we can see some wonderful mother and child scenes in the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper. Enjoy!