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 > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Building a website is a piece of cake. Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).