Television at the Summer Exhibition, 1939
Remarkably, astonishingly, the image agency Getty Images has announced a new initiative to allow the embedding of many of its photographs for non-commercial use in blogs (like this one) and social media channels. A simple new embed tool permits the legal use of more than 35 million images as long as the attribution is included along with a link back to Getty for commercial licensing.
This feels like a game-changing project and I want to reflect on it further in a future post. But I thought to mark the news I would highlight just one image from the Getty millions. Browsing the site, and with my current interests in early television and the arts, I found the glorious shot below of a pre-war television broadcast from the Royal Academy. Getty currently has it catalogued in this way:
circa 1939: A BBC television crew filming artist A K Lawrence varnishing a painting of Queen Elizabeth and her troops at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
I am fairly sure that in fact it relates to the broadcast titled Television Surveys… No 9 at 2.30pm on 24 April 1939. The Radio Times billing is above, and this describes the programme as ‘a visit with Edward Halliday to the galleries at Burlington House to see some of the exhibitors putting final touches to their pictures and sculpture.’ Halliday (1902-1984) was primarily a portrait painter – and you can find 79 images of his work at Your Paintings here. A. K. Lawrence (1893-1975) had been elected as a Royal Academician the year before the broadcast – and there are 33 Your Paintings canvases by him here, including Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury, 1588, which you can see in the photograph. This huge canvas is apparently now in the collection of Essex County Council – I wonder if it’s on show anywhere.
I’m looking forward to taking a closer look at this, which I agree is terrific news. Have you managed to find out if there is any way of contributing information to the image descriptions when, as with the image you include, you have specialist knowledge of the subject that might not have been known to the cataloguer?
Hi Sylvia – it doesn’t seem at present as if Getty is implementing any kind of crowd-sourcing of the sort you suggest. But even without that, this does seem very exciting. There are nearly 7,000 images tagged with “William Shakespeare” for a start!