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Collection of Pierre Daura Paintings and Drawings

D1:004
c. 1920–1974

120 works of art, including 57 watercolors; 24 oil paintings; and pieces in tempera, gouache, pastel, ink, pencil, charcoal, wood, and mixed media, ranging in size from 7 x 10 inches to 32 x 26 inches

D1:004 Collection of Pierre Daura Paintings and Drawings

Pierre Daura (1896–1976), born Pere Francesc Joan Daura i García, was a noted Catalan-American artist. Following early training at the School of Fine Arts (La Llotja) in Barcelona, Daura moved to Paris in 1914 to complete his artistic education. After military service in Minorca during World War I, he returned to Paris in 1920 and became part of its vibrant postwar modern art scene. Daura married the American artist Louise Heron Blair in 1928, and—following the outbreak of World War II—he spent the second half of his life in her home state of Virginia. Daura produced many depictions of the landscape and people of Rockbridge County, where the family settled, and worked prolifically in a variety of media and styles. During the 1940s and 1950s, he also taught at Lynchburg College and Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

The Library of Virginia’s collection of Daura’s work represents both the longevity and breadth of his artistic career, with its greatest strength the images of people and places near his Virginia home. These include self-portraits done over three decades as well as portraits of his wife, their daughter Martha Daura, other family members, … Read the rest

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Edward A. Darby Drawings Collection (Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion)

D1: 005
c. 1940
18 pen-and-ink drawings, ranging in size from 5-1/8 x 6-5/8 inches to 14-5/8 x 7-3/8 inches

Edward A. Darby Drawings Collection (Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion)

This collection of original illustrations and chapter head- and end-pieces was created by Edward A. Darby for Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion.   Compiled by workers of the Work Projects Administration’s state-sponsored Virginia Writers’ Project (1940), the book was initiated as one in a series of state guides begun in 1935 under the Federal Writers Project and was designed to give work to writers, editors, historians, and researchers.

All thirteen of the drawings used in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion can be found in this collection of lighthearted, optimistic, and idealized images. The detailed artwork depicts iconic landmarks, historic sites, and symbols of the early-20th-century countryside that would be recognizable to many Virginians today. Also included in the collection are five additional drawings that do not appear in the guide. They represent an imagined Virginia, where tidewater monuments stand at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and where oxcarts and buggies share the landscape with speeding trains, automobiles, and airplanes.

Arrangement and access:
The collection is arranged in a single series, corresponding to the order in which the illustrations appear in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion, followed by the five remaining drawings.

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Dugald Stewart Walker Bookplate Collection

C1: 107
1920s–1930s
22 plates 

C1:107 Dugald Stewart Walker Bookplate Collection (LVA 10_1319_008)

Failed insurance salesman Dugald Stewart Walker (1883–1937), a native Richmonder and self-styled eccentric very much in artistic and cultural sympathy with the British aesthetes of a generation before, studied drawing at the University of Virginia and the New York School of Art, and was by the late 1920s internationally renowned as both a fine artist and popular illustrator of children’s books. While his gallery work was praised in the museums of London, Paris, and Rome, Walker’s elegant grotesqueries fared poorly back home in Depression-era Richmond—though he was keenly sought after as a bookplate designer by the Richmond and New York elite.                                                                        

With striking black-and-white prints reminiscent of the work of Aubrey Beardsley but distinctly his own, Walker created a whimsical, slightly sinister, and technically precise “Once Upon a Time” world of pleasure gardens, peacocks, satyrs, clowns, archers, and mounted knights. Often in his bookplates the highly personalized iconography of client preference is brought to bear on quaint themes and high modernist design. In the plate for the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, for example, delicately rendered chemistry beakers positioned above a “window” become, in their self-mirroring symmetry, a kind of ornamental pediment. In another plate, otherwise naturalistic boxers, poised for battle, become pilaster-like ornaments on either side of a monumental baroque doorway through which lovers can be glimpsed embracing in a … Read the rest

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Byllesby Dam Photograph Collection

C1: 129
ca. 1911–1912
2 albums, 7 x 11 and 9 x 11 inches, 200 photographs, along with 66 modern copy photographs from albums belonging to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources

C1:129 Byllesby Dam Photograph Collection (LVA 11_1148_019)

In the early twentieth century, the Appalachian Power Company built a series of hydroelectric dams on the New River in Carroll County, Virginia. Completed in 1912, the Byllesby Dam took its name from H. M. Byllesby and Company, a Chicago investment firm that helped start Appalachian Power, and it created the serene 335-acre Byllesby Reservoir still popular with local fishermen and recreational boaters.

C1:129 Byllesby Dam Photograph Collection (LVA 11_1148_024)

The photographs in this collection document the phases of the dam’s construction and the building methods of the period, with interior shots of the transformer house and its giant turbines and wide-angle exterior views of the dam and cement-mixing plant with its and volute casing and draft tube forms, like abstract sculptures in the wilderness, awaiting cement. As significantly, the photographs capture the daily lives of the workers who made their home in the camp, with images of black-papered dormitories for engineers and office staff, tidy vegetable gardens growing beneath power lines, a pair of well-dressed women on horseback (on the same horse), candid shots of “natives” (locals), and various shots of workers at rest and play and gathered around a campfire at night. The collection … Read the rest

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