On May 9th, 2024, the National Libraries Division of the Romanian Library Association organized a work session themed “Graphic Art and Photographic Treasures in the Special Collections of the National Library of Romania”. The event was open to in-person attendees only and was held in the “Alex. Saint-Georges” reading room of the National Library of Romania’s special collections section, gathering 34 participants from the Romanian Academy Library and the National Library of Romania. The special guest of the meeting was Mircea Regneală, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bucharest.
Adriana Dumitran, PhD, presented a remarkable selection from the Photography Room collection, marking the main historical stages of both international and Romanian photography. Such was a daguerreotype dated 1855, the only extant from a representative period of the first photographers in Bucharest. The daguerreotype shows the daughters of an aristocrat, boyar Barbu Slătineanu, whose house hosted daguerreotypist Johann Binder’s studio. Next, our host presented several XIX century photographic techniques: panotypes, photographs formed on a fabric background, using wet collodion, and ferrotypes, photographs made by using the same wet collodion, but on a thin iron plate.
The meeting continued with an album containing photographs taken by Carol Szathmari during the War of Independence (1877-1878), an album presenting the slums of Bucharest in the 1900’s, taken by photographer Ioan Niculescu, a personal album which belonged to Queen Maria, dating from 1906, an album of Fotoglob, a photography studio in Bucharest, showing images taken during Friedrich Wilhelm’s – the heir of the German Empire – visit to Bucharest in April 1909, and a selection of photographs taken by Aurel Bauh and published in the local newspapers between the two world wars, as well as in 1948, during Gh. Dimitrov’s visit to Romania.
The meeting ended with a series of photographs by Emanuel Tânjală, which were part of the photographer’s donation to the library in 2019.
All the photographs benefitted from a complete presentation of their historical context and biographical data. Also, the participants heard about conservation issues and the challenges related to the bibliographic description of this particular type of documents, with a special emphasis on the critical role of preserving this special part of our cultural heritage.
Virginia Herăscu, from the Engravings Department of the Romanian Academy Library, presented a selection of drawings signed by three Romanian painters: Iosif Iser (1881, Bucharest – 1958, Bucharest), Magdalena Rădulescu (1902, Râmnicu Vâlcea – 1983, Paris) and Gheorghe Ionescu-Sin (1896, Sinaia – 1988, Bucharest). Also, the participants had the chance to admire the tome “Tableaux anciens de la galerie Charles Ier, roi de Roumanie, catalogue raisonné, avec soixante-seize héliogravures de MM. Braun, Clément et Cie”, by L. Bachelin (Paris, 1898). Léopold Bachelin was brought to Romania by King Carol I in 1889 and was the Royal House’s librarian and conservator. Many of the works of art comprised in this book can be currently viewed in the European Art Gallery of The National Museum of Art of Romania.
We would like to thank our colleagues in the Special Collections Department of the National Library of Romania, who facilitated this work session and assisted in preparing this bulletin.
