Shari -- a couple of thoughts.

Try the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.  The V&A
is among the world's foremost museums devoted to the
decorative arts and has an extensive fashion
collection.  The V&A was founded in 1852 as the South
Kensington Museum so it would have been fairly
well-established at the time your shoes were on
display in London. Even if the item has no connection
to the museum, they could direct you to some
specialist museums with expertise in Tudor material
culture.

It's not all that likel that the Tudor shoes came from
a still-existing museum that might have put its
catalogs online, which was the subject of your
original question.

A pair of authentic Tudor shoes would have been an
important part of English cultural heritage 300-400 
years later so you are likely looking for a museum
that closed and disposed of its collection, a personal
collection that contained the item or an auction house
sale.

The latter may be the easiest to trace.  I'd suggest
you utilize the university library and see what
newspapers and magazines were covering the London "art
scene" in 1889-1890.  That should give you leads on
what venues existed in London for the purpose of
exhibiting and/or selling art and antiques in 1889-90.
Perhaps you can then trace their modern day
successors.

In the late 19th century printing photographs or line
drawings was expensive so books and other publications
were illustrated quite sparsely by today's standards.
You'll find this is especially true of published
catalogs from the era. 

Exhibition catalogs published by museums and auction
houses in that era were largely intended to be
throwaways, much like brochures are today. Certainly
late 19th and early 20th century catalogs were nothing
like the lavishly illustration, colored and bound
publications we see today.  

19th century exhibit guides  and catalogs are not
especially good candidates for inclusion on web sites
with its insatiable demand for visuals.  They would be
way down the list of items to be scanned and added to
the site of anyone but the most enthusiastic
collector.

Finally, are you certain the shoes are old enough to
have been made in the Tudor era?   According to
Wikipedia, "The Tudor period usually refers to the
period between 1485 and 1603, specifically in relation
to the history of England."  

It would be worth having an expert examine the shoes
to determine their approximate age.  The literature is
full of examples of how American tourists with more
money than sense were fleeced during grand tours. Not
a few of these items wound up in museums around the
U.S.  with the original incorrect attributions still
attached (because curators either lacked the expertise
or did not want to offend their donors.)

Judy Turner
Whitefish Bay, WI

--- "Faber, Shari L (UMC-Student)" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> The exhibition in 1889-90 is the earliest reference
> I have as to where they came from originally. I
> figured it would be a good starting point to see if
> the museum which displayed them in that show had any
> other information as to where they came from, who
> owned them, approximately what year they were made,
> etc. And if not, it would be interesting at least to
> know where they were shown in order to update the
> museum record.
> 
> The Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University
> of Missouri, where the shoes are currently, has
> little information other than an approximate date
> and the fact that the shoes were in an exhibition
> somewhere in London in 1889 with the registration
> #174.1. 
> 
> I have a book cataloging a Tudor show from London in
> 1890 from the New Gallery on Regent Street. However,
> the accession numbers don't match up. I'm wondering
> if perhaps there's another exhibition from that year
> at another gallery somewhere in London.
> 
> --Shari Faber
> 



       
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