47. Langdon Warner Photograph Album

Art historian Langdon Warner (1881-1955) graduated from Harvard in 1903. From 1923-1950 he served as Lecturer in the Fine Arts and Curator of Oriental Art in the Fogg Museum. In 1925-26 he led the second Fogg expedition to China to study and photograph in the Buddhist caves in the western part of the country. The Langdon Warner Collection in the Fine Arts Library includes the negatives made on this trip as well as prints and albums. The photographic album shown here illustrates the Yulin Caves (Wanfo Xia), situated to the west of Dunhuang. The images are arranged so as to show the physical arrangement of the wall paintings in each cave. Annotations listed provide orientation such as “East Wall, North End”. When Warner later published the photographs of Cave 5, the focus of the captions was more the iconography of the paintings, such as the donor image represented here.