Robert Zacharias

23 Mar 2016

I’m using a small subset of the very large Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. Specifically, I’ll be looking at every image tagged “candlestick.” (Here’s the search results from their website; at the time of this writing it returns 935 results, of which 801 records have images.)

Sample of the first handful of results:

174423 ADA2723 ADA2724 DP147864 DP207241 DP251738 DP251740 DP261193 DP261194 Robert R. Jarvie (American, 1865–1941) Candlestick, ca. 1901 American, Bronze; H. 13 3/4 in. (34.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. David Lubart Gift, in memory of Katherine J. Lubart, 1944–1975, 1981 (1981.157.2) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/1320 Robert R. Jarvie (American, 1865–1941) Candlestick, ca. 1903 American, Bronze; H. 13 3/4 in. (34.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. David Lubart Gift, in memory of Katherine J. Lubart, 1944–1975, 1981 (1981.157.1) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/1319

Note that there are a few computational trickynesses already present at first blush:

  1. Some images are near-duplicates of others; this appears to generally be because the museum has two items from the same edition, acquired at different times
  2. background color/gradient and photo composition aren’t uniform
  3. some images contain more than one candlestick

I’d like to extract the contours of the sides of all of the candlesticks and use these as the basis for a comparison of different shapes, as well as possibly assembling one megacandlestick by virtually stacking these all on top of each other, end to end.