National Library of Spain (BNE) Releases Digital Collection of Circus Photographs

From Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE)/National Library of Spain (Mechanically Translated via Google Translate):

The Hispanic Digital Library has a new outstanding collection that already offers about 250 circus photographs, from the Fernández Ardavín – Leonard Parish fund.

In July 2018 the systematic cataloging and digitization of this collection began, consisting of about 8,300 photographs (mostly portraits) that artists and agents from multiple points of the world geography sent to Circo Price in order to promote their numbers.

The collection was acquired in 1963 by purchase from César Fernández Ardavín, a man closely linked to the circus world due to his collaboration with Price in the design and printing of numerous advertising posters that he would sign as Vinfer. As a result of this professional relationship, it develops between Ardavín and the one who was the director of the circus in the 20s, Leonard Parish, a close friendship. Upon his death in 1930, Parish bequeathed to his friend the collection of photographs that he and his father, William Parish, had gathered since 1880 as directors of the Price Circus. Likewise, to a large extent, the entry of these materials in the BNE is due to the intervention of Alfredo Marquerie, playwright, essayist and passionate defender of the circus, to whom he dedicated multiple essays and chronicles. Aware of the transcendence of the collection of photographs that his friend Fernández Ardavín treasured, Marquerie persuades him to offer them to a public institution and thus ensure their conservation and dissemination.

In 1989 a description of this collection is included in the Inventory Guide of the National Library’s photographic collections and, although a large number of photographs have been cataloged on demand since their acquisition, it is in July 2018 when the cataloging and digitization of your funds is made systematic.

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