Oh wow, it's been a decade! I remember this, and was excited to see these released. Nice work!

This actually inspired me to go out and start (slowly) cataloging mostly historic 100+ yr old landscapes that were locked behind mostly non-US pay-to-access (cough British museums cough), and write a flurry of emails to institutions encouraging uploading high res versions. I'm contemplating a project to put historic paintings "on the map", depicting their geographically represented locations (when applicable), giving a window into the past. Maybe I should circle back on this effort to get more paintings released...

Blog post author here! Always happy to see people looking at and reading about these paintings. Happy to answer any questions or job offers people here may have!

If anybody just wants to download the hi-res images, Internet Archive is your friend: https://archive.org/details/usda-pomological-watercolor-coll...

You can have fun with 'em since they're public domain (:

Note 1: The metadata, such as title, author, etc. seem to be missing. If anyone knows of a collection with all that included, let me know (it's not in the EXIF either, I spot-checked).

EDIT: aha! Here is metadata, which you can correlate to the image files: https://github.com/Wumms/pomological

Note 2: I saw this in the MARC catalog record:

  Use of the images in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological
  Watercolor Collection is not restricted, but a statement of attribution is
  required. Please use the following attribution statement: "U.S. Department
  of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special
  Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705"

Thanks to your collection, I had an absolute blast going down a silly rabbit hole of compression.

https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/rotation-based-compression...

Became friends with Parker during my time at the Recurse Center. He's even more obsessed (in a good way) and funny in person! Glad to see his post on the top of HN.

you know how "m" can look like an "rn" ligature? I swore I was going to be looking at a more acamdemic style of watercolor art in the field of pornology...

Thank you Parker Higgins, these are quite lovely.

There's a related story from the USDA about these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287019

I had never encountered the word 'Pomological' in my life until this article. My brain scanned it as starting with P-o-r-n, because that made more sense in context.

At this point, I've made my choice. I'm not going to look up the word. (I've lived more than 50 years, it's not likely to add much value for me now.) I'm not going to read the article. (It could only disappoint...)

I think less of parkerhiggins.net for tricking me with this article title. I think less of fanf2 for submitting this tricky article title. I resent even the time I've spent writing this. Bleah!

I was scrolling the page looking for links so I could see them all, until i realized the links were just slightly in bold, rather than a different color and underlined. Would be good to highlight the links a little more on your site.

Awesome work either way!

> " This was my first ever project in Python, and in many ways, the start of my life as a programmer. The domino effect here is a little mind-boggling for me."

I can certainly relate to this. I started scripting for very obtuse reasons, and quickly started seeing things everywhere which I could apply a little code to and improve my life.

I think I'm going to print a few of these for my office. Thanks thisisparker

What on earth is Pornological about these?

Read this as pornological. Came away disappointed.

Nice apples.

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