New Images Received!

Images, images... A major task in putting together almost any art history book is the gathering of the necessary images. Yet, sad to say, this is generally a long and painful process. You may recall reading about some painting or sculpture in an article or book and being annoyed that there was no photo of it--well, that could mean that a) the author couldn't locate a print-quality photo of it; b) the cost of the print-quality photo was prohibitively high; c) it wasn't possible to clear copyright; or d) the publisher put a limit on the number of images in order to keep the cost of printing under control. Yep.
Notice that first possible problem--locating a print-quality photo of the artwork! In the world of digital photography, that means it is not just a faithful photo of the artwork, but that it has a minimum of 300 dpi (versus the 72 dpi normally used for Web images). In other words, trawling the internet for a suitable photo is generally not an option. Nor is it usually possible to scan from a book, due to the existing printed dot pattern. (Think how a photocopy of a photocopy isn't as good as the first photocopy, which isn't as good as the original.)
Where do we find these good-quality photos? Well, we get them from museums, from private collectors, from art galleries, from third-party sources of various kinds, and sometimes we shoot the photos ourselves. All of this takes a lot of time.
I've been lucky in that as much of Toyen's work involved illustration, I could photograph from the books she illustrated. Thank you to the archives, libraries, and private collectors to whom these books belong! I have hundreds of photos of these illustrations, as well as some photos of illustrations by her peers. (Not that I can use hundreds of photos of these book illustrations in my own book, but at least I can use a fair number of them as examples of particular themes and stylistic choices.)
I did not, however, have even all of the book illustrations that I wanted to use, and here a friend of mine who works for a collector has been very helpful. He passed along numerous photos of illustrations and prints by Toyen awhile back, for which I am eternally grateful, and now he has also provided me with many by her artistic partner Jindřich Štyrský as well!
Life is suddenly better and my stress level regarding images has dropped a notch.