Conspectus

Collection Details

Title Kate Matthews Collection
Archive SDC
Plugin edu.louisville.Matthews by University of Louisville
Base URL http://harvest.library.louisville.edu/Matthews
Description This digital collection celebrates the work of photographer Kate Seston Matthews (1870-1956). Born in New Albany, Indiana, Matthews spent most of her life in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, where she began taking photographs in the 1880s. Matthews relied almost exclusively on her own community and acquaintances as subjects -- a favor she returned by reproducing and signing her photographs for friends and family. While she is best known for her photographs depicting characters in the Little Colonel series of children's books written by her friend and neighbor Annie Fellows Johnston, Matthews also created tableaux vivants, or living pictures, based on nursery rhymes, fairy tales, poetry, and other works of art, and she captured on film an idyllic view of the people, architecture, and landscape of her in the small, rural community near Louisville, Kentucky.
Repository Type Not specified

Related Items

AccrualPeriodicity no longer
AccrualPolicy If other photographs by Matthews are accessioned by the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, we would consider scanning them and preserving the digital copies.
AccessRights unrestricted
Creator Matthews, Kate, 1870-1956
Description This digital collection celebrates the work of photographer Kate Seston Matthews (1870-1956). Born in New Albany, Indiana, Matthews spent most of her life in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, where she began taking photographs in the 1880s. Matthews relied almost exclusively on her own community and acquaintances as subjects -- a favor she returned by reproducing and signing her photographs for friends and family. While she is best known for her photographs depicting characters in the Little Colonel series of children's books written by her friend and neighbor Annie Fellows Johnston, Matthews also created tableaux vivants, or living pictures, based on nursery rhymes, fairy tales, poetry, and other works of art, and she captured on film an idyllic view of the people, architecture, and landscape of her in the small, rural community near Louisville, Kentucky.
Extent 2147483647
Format text/xml
Format image/tiff
Format text/plain
Language eng
Publisher Louisville
Provenance Much of Kate Matthews' work was lost a few years after her death when a fire destroyed Clovercroft, the Matthews' family home in Pewee Valley. Fortunately, in the early 1960s, Robert J. Doherty, then Curator of the University of Louisville's Photographic Archives, launched a program to locate and catalog as much of Matthews' remaining work as possible. Doherty and Richard Duncan, a Pewee Valley resident and partner in Kentucky's leading photographic studio, Caulfield & Shook, Inc., initially made prints and copy negatives from glass negatives and original prints which Kate Matthews had given to friends and relatives. Over time several individuals, including Matthews' great-nephew, Matthews Fletcher, and Johnston's stepdaughter, Mary Johnston, generously donated many of those original items along with other albums and hand-tinted prints to the university's Photographic Archives in Ekstrom Library's Special Collections. Through donation and purchase, the University of Louisville now houses the largest extant collection of Kate Matthews' work, with over 760 items including more than 362 original prints; seventy-six original negatives; one original painting; and copies of at least thirty-eight other distinct photographic images attributed to Matthews.
Rights University of Louisville Photographic Archives
Spatial Pewee Valley (Ky.)
Spatial Oldham County (Ky.)
Spatial Benton Harbor (Mich.)
Temporal 1880-1940 
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Parameter Values Status Copies
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