12 ms·
In 1886, the US commissioned watercolor paintings of every known fruit (2019)
- karim79 3y agoSimilar thread from March: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30546986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30546986
- Uninen 3y agoI hope they'll put these on Flickr!
- AgentOrange1234 3y agoWild! This fills me with joy for reasons I do not understand. Thanks for posting.
- neontomo 3y agoI feel the same. It's like this kindled a new interest, or the beginning of an interest, and I don't quite know what it is that is so interesting. I'm happy this is in the public domain and I'm gonna brainstorm things to do with it!
- blululu 3y agoTangentially related but about a year ago I trained a StyleGAN on this dataset. The results did an interesting job mapping out the transition from apples to stone fruit: http://www.highdimensionalcoconuts.com/Work/GenerativeImages/GenerativeFruit/generative_fruit.html http://www.highdimensionalcoconuts.com/Work/GenerativeImages...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BandButcher 3y agoVery cool
- CSMastermind 3y agoThis reminds me of John James Audubon and his seminal work, "The Birds of America." Audubon dedicated much of his life trying to paint every American bird. He basically crowdfunded the work by getting people to pay in advance for bird prints. "The Birds of America" is a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life, with original copies being incredibly valuable collectors' items. If you want to go down a rabbithole read up on his biography.
- oh_sigh 3y agoNeither here nor there, but I just read an article today about how a bunch of birds are being renamed, because of 'harmful' views by Audobon et al https://apnews.com/article/bird-renaming-american-ornithological-society-aee0f0b0d1cc9ae3326bc44a2d1f55e8 https://apnews.com/article/bird-renaming-american-ornitholog...
- oooyay 3y agoJohn Audubon was a slaver outside of his contributions to birding. That's why all the "Audubon Societies" are changing their names. The rest of the birds are birds named after people and the general decree is to rename all birds named after people and never name things after people again. They'll all have descriptive names now.
- oh_sigh 3y agoNeither here nor there, but my alma mater (TCNJ) renamed a building a few years ago - from "Loser Hall" to "Trenton Hall". Paul Loser was the superintendent of the Trenton school system in the early 20th century, and he was in support of segregation of black people into separate school systems. So, a reasonable renaming I think. But renaming it Trenton is itself problematic - Trenton is named after William Trent, a merchant who became one of the richest men in Philadelphia by trading, among other things, literal boatloads of slaves, which seems strictly worse than believing "merely" in segregation.
- NoImmatureAdHom 3y agoI have nothing to say other than: I fucking love this
- flakes 3y agoWhat's wild about this, is that there are probably a huge number of fruits that were not even discovered yet at this time. For example, this fruit discovered in 2016 https://blog.pensoft.net/2016/02/12/new-species-with-heart-shaped-fruits-inspires-a-love-for-biodiversity-in-hawaii/ https://blog.pensoft.net/2016/02/12/new-species-with-heart-s... > Just in time for Valentine’s Day, botanists from Hawai’i have discovered a new species of plant with small heart-shaped fruits. The new species is a member of the coffee family (Rubiaceae) and part of the genus Coprosma, which occurs across many remote islands of the Pacific Ocean. They named the new Hawaiian species after the symbol of love – calling it Coprosma cordicarpa – meaning the Coprosma with heart-shaped fruit.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThis would make a fantastic children's book/"kidcyclopedia" for teaching kids the fruits and vegetables
- sunsetonsaturn 3y agoI take a similar approach in this children's book: https://github.com/ralienpp/book-two https://github.com/ralienpp/book-two. In the end there is a section about the trees* that grow in the area, their leaves and fruits - so kids can learn to identify them. I'll incorporate some of these materials in the next iterations of the book. The first link in the repo readme is for the on-screen PDF, you can look at the pictures. * One of the characters in the story uses trees to figure out where they are and find their way back home.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoIt would be cool if there was like an interactive and facillitated way to filter all the stuff for that which is local and that they can seek out, like Pokemon Go or whatever
- pvaldes 3y agoMaybe not. Would be confusing for the children. After taking a quick look, many of this fruit varieties don't exist anymore. Other were renamed and other paintings reflect fruit diseases, not the fruit itself. Botanical art is valuable art, but this work does not reflect the present.
- toolz 3y ago> over 7,500 paintings, drawings, and wax models commissioned by the USDA between 1886 and 1942... > ...After investing $300,000, they had made $600 in fees in five years. They couldn't get better art for 300k?! First inflation adjustment calculator I found says 300k in 1910 is 9.3MM today. Maybe, in a way this is reassuring though, that the world can maintain status quo since the late 1800s even with such frivolous misuse of public money.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoI read it as $300k was the amount spent digitizing the paintings in ~2009. So about $40 per painting, which seems a bit high but I'm more curious what prompted them to digitize them at all.
- defrost 3y agoConservation. Digitized objects can be "looked at" without exposing the originals to light, humidity, and tempreture changes (which cause slow degradation) and serve as a "record of original" should the originals be damaged or otherwise need restoration work.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoI'm surprised the USDA cared about the originals enough to spend resources on conservation. Imagine the pitch meeting for the project. "Let's spend $300k digitizing these old paintings of fruit, if we do surely we'll make a killing selling high def access to them. After all, nobody else has paintings of fruit, we'll have the market cornered!" I'm not saying it's a waste that they did this, I'm curious how they decided to.
- defrost 3y ago> if we do surely we'll make a killing selling high def access to them. In my experience of Commonwealth ( Australia | UK | Canada ) public record conservation this never happens - nobody pitches profit via flogging access although that can arise as a useful side revenue. The focus tends to be on record preservation, digital version of documents (for example) allow rapid indexed access and extends the lifetime of the original considerably. The silos of the British library (for example) make the closing scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark look small in comparison.
- anonu 3y agoThe usda.gov is unusable right now. Maybe its being slasdhdotted or maybe its always been unusable. https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01NAL_INST:MAIN&collectionId=81279629860007426 https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...
- hhh 3y agoworks perfectly and loads instantly for me
- Firmwarrior 3y agoI think they're all or mostly mirrored here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:USDA_Pomological_Watercolors https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:USDA_Pomological...
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoI think the title should be qualified as 'edible fruit' because that's what this seems to be about, not any old fruit botanically speaking
- famahar 3y agoAll public domain too. Someone should make a card game using the art. I plan on using the art as set dressing in a game I'm making.
- wumms 3y agotorrent: https://archive.org/download/usda-pomological-watercolor-collection/usda-pomological-watercolor-collection_archive.torrent https://archive.org/download/usda-pomological-watercolor-col... magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2f3f472d24980c11d82cb236f04d1f74138e45c4&dn=usda-pomological-watercolor-collection&tr=http%3a%2f%2fbt1.archive.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=http%3a%2f%2fbt2.archive.org%3a6969%2fannounce&ws=http%3a%2f%2fia801808.us.archive.org%2f11%2fitems%2f&ws=https%3a%2f%2fia601808.us.archive.org%2f11%2fitems%2f
- tristanb 3y agothank you - i was looking for that :)
- bash-j 3y agoThanks! Is it possible to include the metadata in the images? So we can know the artist's name, the title of the piece and the subject, e.g. strawberries? It seems to be available on the site when you click one on the images.
- me-vs-cat 3y agoOne of the files is usda-pomological-watercolor-collection_meta.sqlite (16M). Hopefully the metadata is all there. Also, curses upon whomever created a 100G torrent that is half padding files.
- wumms 3y agoThe SQLite file only contains some archive.org metadata (size, timestamp, etc.). I merged all metadata I could gather here: https://github.com/Wumms/pomological https://github.com/Wumms/pomological
- Jerrrry 3y ago[flagged]
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoWhat? Is this on the wrong post or am I missing something?
- barbe 3y agoFor those of you intrigued by these watercolors, I highly recommend The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone about the botanist, David Fairchild, who is credited with introducing most of the foods we eat today to this country, starting in the 1890s. Many of the watercolors in the exhibit are the samples he and the other food explorers brought back to this country from their world travels. After reading this book, you will never look at the produce aisles in a grocery store in the same frame of mind again. A marvelous, remarkable read...
- jpasholk 3y agoWow, this is so amazing. I wonder if these are available through an API?
- jgalt212 3y agoAnd the twitter feed based on these: https://twitter.com/pomological?lang=en https://twitter.com/pomological?lang=en
- Niksko 3y agoAnd the equivalent mastodon account: https://botsin.space/@pomological https://botsin.space/@pomological
- np_tedious 3y agoCovid stimulus should've funded cool stuff like this. Submit one watercolor painting per week to get that extra $600/wk federal unemployment
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoI think we need a bunch of peoples crappy watercolor paintings
- np_tedious 3y agoHey it doesn't need to be efficient when you're just throwing money around. Pay someone else to rank them and pick the best ones. Some amount of them will be good
- chankstein38 3y agoThis is such an interesting idea. Basically employ everyone receiving the stimulus as contractors to do something like this. A group of people make the paintings, a group assesses them for quality, others categorize and label. Every job is small and relatively straightforward while also giving something to show for the money!
- mistercheph 3y agoYour low opinion of others is simply a reflection of the low esteem in which you hold yourself.
- chankstein38 3y agoTo be honest, I don't think I'm the only one who would agree that, if they hired me, the results would be crappy.
- dclowd9901 3y agoThat’s actually a really cool idea. Like, make something. Anything. And you get paid. I know some people would revolt against the idea that one should “have to do something to get welfare money” like it’s some sort of thumbing the nose at “welfare queens” or whatever. But no, it has a lot of very constructive benefits. 1) a person feels a sense of pride for earning money for something they created 2) they are building a portfolio of work and training themselves toward perhaps making it a meaningful career 3) we as a society may benefit by seeing some really astonishing work that we would never have discovered otherwise.
- totetsu 3y agoThe university I attended in Japan had in its library great original books from this era with similar illustrations.
- o11c 3y agoNote that the text tags are often sloppy, e.g. the one just labeled "Citrus" in the text is "Pomerange" in the image.
- jakeogh 3y agoOdd fruit YT gem: Jarad Rydelek: I spent 10 years trying to eat every fruit in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB44-Chp3Rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB44-Chp3Rw
- jwilber 3y ago5 years back I made a dataset of these, the USDA Pomological paintings, available on GitHub: https://github.com/jwilber/USDA_Pomological_Watercolors https://github.com/jwilber/USDA_Pomological_Watercolors
- chankstein38 3y agoTHANK YOU! This is much easier for me than a torrent!
- bruce343434 3y agoLink to the gallery: https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01NAL_INST:MAIN&collectionId=81279629860007426 https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...
- nojvek 3y agoHN hug of death making site not load.
- mrabcx 3y agoSeems to have missed out on durian.
- fodkodrasz 3y agoIs there some similar publicly available catalog of mushroom painting? Asking for a friend...
- taubek 3y agoIt would be nice to see if all those varsities still exist today and if they have changed in an appearance. I know that in my country a lot of old apples can no longer be found.
- pvaldes 3y agoIs complicated. Most of them, not. Many European varieties where shamelesly renamed also in America for marketing or by cancel culture reasons (yup). Thus the fruit can exist but with its older name. Before DNA tests, It was a total mess. Pursuing the desired variety to receive a modern clone substitute Is still a problem today.
- FiniteLooper 3y agoI love this, but could you imagine if this were something done today? In the current political climate and news cycles it would be "look at how the stupid {{political_party}} is wasting your tax dollars!" or probably every worse/dumber things than that.
- Kalium 3y agoThis project wasn't undertaken for artistic reasons. It was done so that the US government had records and depictions of domestic produce that could be used in efforts to promote trade. Watercolors were almost certainly the best available option at the time. Today it would be a waste of money. We have digital cameras and pretty good records of what produce American farmers grow without hiring several dozen artists to traipse around for years.
- dfxm12 3y agoIt creates jobs though, which is usually seen as positive, no? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 867-5309 3y agoguessing *edible fruit
- horrible-hilde 3y ago“to its detriment– a friendly demeanor that allowed humans to approach and capture it with little resistance.” ugh, what a world.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LUKESHICK 3y ago[dead]
- tortoise_in 3y agoThe drawings are wonderful