10 Years of Pomological Watercolors

https://parkerhiggins.net/2025/04/10-years-of-pomological-watercolors/

by fanf2 • 1 year ago

219 31 1 year ago

parkerhiggins.net

sorokod• 1 year ago

Thank you Parker Higgins, these are quite lovely.

DrillShopper• 1 year ago

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

smidgeon• 1 year ago

Nice apples.

esquivalience• 1 year ago

" 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.

namanyayg• 1 year ago

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.

thisisparker3• 1 year ago

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!

ksherlock• 1 year ago

Thanks for your work. I used one of the pomo pictures in a project a few years back.

biker1425414• 1 year ago

Echoing the same thanks! I have used as well personally as technique references and in several projects directly.

parkerhiggins• 1 year ago

incredible, impactful, and authentic read!

thisisparker3• 1 year ago

lol thank you other Parker Higgins, always a pleasure to run into you here

schoen• 1 year ago

Hey Parker, congratulations on your NYT daily crossword publications! I solve the Daily every day and have been impressed to see your work there a number of times now.

3dsnano2• 1 year ago

thanks for taking the time to care about something that others may find pointless and pursue it to a point where it becomes something new and important. i want to let you know that i find myself inspired!!!

interroboink2• 1 year ago

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"

biker1425414• 1 year ago

I'm also noticing there is no explicit license on the official page. If it's public domain, attribution is not required. If it is not public domain, they should clarify the license (pretty sure this is indeed public domain).

Ambiguity like this is way too common...

interroboink2• 1 year ago

Yeah, agreed it's weird.

For another data point, this catalog.data.gov site[1] lists the license as "us-pd" (ie public domain in the USA). But then yeah, like you said the attribution demand is invalid.

[1] https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/u-s-department-of-agricultu...

msla• 1 year ago

I wonder how the USDA can demand anything regarding images created well before the copyright cutoff of 1929. I strongly suspect that's boilerplate text with no actual force.

biker1425414• 1 year ago

Oh definitely no force behind it, but just annoying to see. These kinds of issues don't exactly block usage, but can plant a lot of confusion or hesitation for potential users. I wish agencies proactively embraced "please go use this awesome stuff" mentality vs gatekeeping by default.

biker1425414• 1 year ago

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...

CodeLikeHell• 1 year ago

I would absolutely love to see that project come to fruition.

3dsnano2• 1 year ago

DO IT

__mharrison__• 1 year ago

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

snug2• 1 year ago

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!

thisisparker3• 1 year ago

good shout, I think some recent typography changes made the bolding more subtle on mobile. I've pushed an update underlining them and it should be live momentarily!

snug2• 1 year ago

Ahh yes, much better

anothernewdude• 1 year ago

What on earth is Pornological about these?

Cerium• 1 year ago

Bad keming joke? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomology

jihadjihad• 1 year ago

Evil Lord Keming strikes again!

winstonrc• 1 year ago

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...

dfex• 1 year ago

Read this as pornological. Came away disappointed.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

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...

aghastnj• 1 year ago

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!

10 Years of Pomological Watercolors

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