Marion Blake papers

This is a page with a sketch plan of a mausoleum and a sketch plan of a Nereid monument, drawn by Marion Blake.

This is a letter from Prof. Rollin Harvelle Tanner, General Secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America, to Marion E. Blake. In this letter, Prof. Tanner welcomes her as a speaker at their upcoming meeting and provides some information she needs to know in advance. He requests that she check the way her name, position, and title are printed on an enclosed program (not pictured). He also reminds her that the time limit for delivering a paper is twenty minutes, so she should prepare to conform to that rule.

This is a small black and white photograph of Marion Blake seated on a donkey, with an unidentified man (possibly a guide) standing near the head of the donkey. In the background, across the fields, a mountain range can be seen. The photograph may have been taken during Miss Blake's travels in Italy, although the location is unknown.

This is a photograph depicting Marion Blake standing with an unidentified male companion on a pathway in a garden. The location is unknown, but possibly in Italy. The approximate date range is 1920s-1930s.

This manuscript, written by Marion Blake in 1925, consists of a title page, 43 typed pages, and two handwritten pages at the end. Following the text are three pages (plates) of photographs of floor mosaics. Most of the photographs were taken of mosaic pavements in situ, at the site of the archaeological excavations. One photograph was taken of a fragment of pavement in a museum. Miss Blake submitted this paper to the American Academy in Rome for possible publication in 1926. It elicited a letter from A. W. Van Buren, of the American Academy, in which he suggested corrections and changes if she wanted to prepare the paper for publication by the Academy. Throughout the manuscript, small editorial changes are penned or pencilled in, usually in handwriting that looks like Blake's. Perhaps some were made at the suggestion of Mr. Van Buren.

This is one of four letters from Doris Taylor Bishop to Cora L. Eastman after the death of Marion Blake. The four letters discuss details of Marion Blake's work, and mention many people in Rome who may or may not have been working at the American Academy, but were certainly part of the intellectual and social community of the place. This letter in particular discusses Eastman's findings based on information about Blake supplied by Bishop. It should be noted that Marion Blake's last manuscript for publication, which was in progress at the time of her death, was edited and completed by Doris Bishop, who had been a Guggenheim Fellow in Rome in 1959-1960 and had become acquainted with Blake then. At the end of 1962, the incomplete text of Blake's manuscript was given to Bishop, who then spent a sabbatical in Rome in 1963-1964. She worked on that text and other materials left by Blake, to produce the volume that would be published in 1973, by the American Philosophical Society, as "Roman Construction in Italy from Nerva Through the Antonines."

This is a five-page letter from A. W. Van Buren, of the American Academy in Rome, to Marion E. Blake when she was a professor at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The topic of the letter is a scholarly paper that Prof. Blake had submitted to Gorham P. Stevens, Director of the Academy in Rome. This paper was about the ancient mosaic pavements of Rome. Mr. Van Buren makes editorial suggestions for Prof. Blake and encourages her to publish it as a paper or a volume through the American Academy in Rome.

This is a study of tile patterns and details from a mosaic (or mosaics) that Marion Blake observed in Todi, Italy.

This is a study of tile patterns and details from a mosaic (or mosaics) that Marion Blake observed in Todi, Italy.

This is a photograph of a large group of travelers on the deck of a ship, taken during Marion Blake's Scandinavian trip in 1930. Whether or not Miss Blake is among the travelers pictured is uncertain. The back of the photograph is stamped with the name and address of the photographer's studio in New York City. It also has a handwritten note to identify the subject and date, as well as the filing location in Archives and Special Collections.