Halsted B. Vander Poel Campanian collection - Calisphere

Halsted B. Vander Poel Campanian Collection, circa 1570-1997, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no.
2002.M.16
Acquisition Information
The collection was donated by Halsted B. Vander Poel in 2002.
Processing History
Ann Harrison rehoused the collection and created the series arrangement and finding aid in 2006.
Separated Material
Over 1,000 books and individual periodical issues from the collection were separated to the library. A search using the
phrase "VanderPoel" while selecting the index "Provenance" from the pull-down menu in the Getty online library catalog
will retrieve a list of these separated materials, as well as the Vander Poel collection-level record and records for books
remaining in the archive. Similar searches using "Della Corte" and "Warsher" in the Provenance index will retrieve books
from these scholars' libraries.
Biographical / Historical Note
Halsted Billings Vander Poel (variant form VanderPoel) was born in 1911 at the family estate in New York City. He
graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1935 and then served in the Navy in World War II.
After the war, he married, moved to Washington, D.C. and worked in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
While still at Yale, Vander Poel developed a strong interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and
soon began collecting books and manuscripts. Vander Poel quickly became established as a serious collector, and
broadened his range to include Old Master paintings, American portraits and English furniture and silver.
In 1956, Vander Poel moved to Rome. There he was involved in various cultural and educational projects, including the
restoration of frescoes in Roman churches, and the administration of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House at the Spanish
Steps. In 1964, he was one of the founders of St. Stephen's School, an American preparatory school in Rome.
In Rome, Vander Poel met two archaeologists, Matteo Della Corte, a former Director of Excavations at Pompeii, and Tatiana
Warscher, a leading historiographer of the site, and through them became fascinated with Pompeii. For the next forty
years, Vander Poel devoted considerable time and financial resources to creating an extensive research library and archive
on the archaeological investigations in Pompeii.
In 1997 Vander Poel returned to the United States for health reasons. He died in Washington D.C. on June 27, 2003.
Scope and Content of Collection
The Vander Poel Campanian collection is a research archive assembled for the study of the history of the excavations at
Pompeii and to a lesser extent, at Herculaneum and Stabiae. It represents the culmination of forty years of investigations
by Vander Poel. He collected rare books, prints, photographs, maps and other original documents. He preserved the papers
of Matteo Della Corte and Tatiana Warscher, left to him as bequests upon their deaths. He sponsored excavations and
commissioned mapping and photography of the site. He funded and led a research team known as the Research in
Campanian Archaeology (RICA) Group. His numerous projects, many still in the planning stages, included the production
and distribution of the Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum, a multi-volume work on the history of the excavations at
Pompeii; the production of updated editions of important research texts; and documentation of the Pompeian material in
the Archaeological Museum at Naples.
Until recently, the excavations at Pompeii have been poorly documented and the documentation that does exist has been
dispersed throughout various European depositories and private collections. Within this documentation, there is conflicting
nomenclature and enumeration of locations. Vander Poel's contribution to scholarship through the creation of his
Campanian collection was the important, if not glamorous, task of collecting this dispersed information and supervising the
creation of tools, ranging from concordances of house numbers to new maps of the site, which facilitate the study of
Pompeii.
This assembling of resources for the study of Pompeii accounts for the extremely broad date range of the collection. Vander
Poel worked on his Campanian projects and collected the material in the period roughly from 1958 to 1997. The broad date
range of the collection, circa 1570-1997, reflects the dates of the materials, both original works and reproductions, within it.
The highlights of the Campanian collection include Matteo Della Corte's field notes, Tatiana Warscher's photographic
documentation of Pompeii, the unpublished notes of Vander Poel's excavations of the Casa di Meleagro, manuscripts of the
unpublished portions of the Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum, and the extensive scholarly documentation, both textual
and visual, of Pompeii assembled by Vander Poel.
Throughout this finding aid, all photographic prints and negatives are black-and-white, unless indicated as color. The house
numbering used in the finding aid follows the current system of numeration for the site of Pompeii, see Andrew
Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xix. The
INVENTORY OF THE HALSTED B.
VANDER POEL CAMPANIAN
COLLECTION, circa 1570-1997
2002.M.16 3