Hand-colored Mary Pickford Scrapbook from 1921

This scrapbook from the Mary Pickford Foundation collection was made by sixteen-year-old Janet Esme Vernon of Buckinghamshire, England in 1921. Miss Vernon also created another scrapbook housed at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.

Filled with hand-tinted clippings from English newspapers and magazines, it serves as an invaluable record of the U.K. press’s impression of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on their second trip to England as well as an authentic, unpolished perspective on the famous couple thanks to Miss Vernon’s handwritten memoirs enclosed in the book’s artistic pages. To colorize the black-and-white clippings, she must have used a combination of medium-hard charcoals and lightweight paints applied with a fine brush, so as not to damage the thin magazine and newsprint paper.