open access

We enjoyed perusing the curated, select gallery of some of the highlights from a trove of over thirty-four thousand artworks and artefacts that the venerable Cleveland Museum of Art has just released to the public wholly royalty-free and without restrictions.
While such proclamations are common-place and some may doubt their newsworthiness—arguing that the institution is just catching up with a movement that ought to have been universally practised long ago, but such events are not just laudable but also a gateway to explore and inspect a happily crowded field. Take this image—for example, of Nathaniel Olds by local resident Jeptha Homer Wade, an itinerate portrait painter whose interest and salesmanship grew out of experiments with early daguerreotypy and synthesised into an interest in the burgeoning technology of the telegraph. The industrialist and eventual philanthropist, benefactor of many educational and cultural institutions as was the exhibiting museum itself, was one of the foundered of Western Union. We’ve yet to uncover anything about the subject—however. Much more to explore at the links above.