For years, artist and illustrator Albert Alexander Smith penned letters from his longtime residence in Paris, France to Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, at The New York Public Library's 135th Street Library Branch, Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints—what we now call the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nearly a century ago, the library purchased Schomburg's personal collection of materials documenting African diasporic history and culture, and he was appointed Curator of the collection in 1932.
Around that same time, Smith and Schomburg communicated with regularity, sharing updates about their personal lives, discussing the socio-political climate of the era (amid the Great Depression), and negotiating business opportunities centering Schomburg’s growing collection and Smith’s art-making practices. Their shared research endeavors resulted in the following series of commissioned watercolor renderings of historical figures. Correspondence between the two friends explains Smith's process of sourcing reference imagery to inform his version of each likeness; which included visits to library collections, museums, and even fellow collectors and colleagues of Schomburg's. A closer look at several of these portraits reveals hand written annotations for Smith's references.
In June of 1938, Smith began one particular note by acknowledging two letters he’d just received from Schomburg and expressed a sense of urgency to send a reply that Schomburg would never receive. Postmarked June 14, 1938, it was sent four days after Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's death. The urgency in Smith's tone is now eerily ironic.
While Arturo Schomburg would never see the full completion of this series of watercolor portraits, his efforts to commission them is a testament to his life-long dedication and thriving legacy of documenting and preserving the history and culture of the African diaspora.
