The Mushroom Drawings of Violetta Delafield

The Montgomery Place Collections at Bard College contain hundreds of mushroom drawings by Violetta Delafield, most of which are watercolors with specimen data describing each species she collected. This exhibit displays a small collection of these drawings and notations. Accompanying this selection are descriptions of the work written by the students in the Experimental Humanities/Art History course, “The History of the Experiment (ARTH 252).” Having little more than an unpublished biography of Violetta (written by her husband), the students reflected on her catalog of mushrooms, considered its qualities as a database in the original analog form, and then created a digitized version for this exhibit.

To view the entire catalog of mushrooms visit the Violetta White Delafield Mushroom Drawings Collection in Artstor.