IT WOULD be the perfect job for a pharmacist, well accustomed to deciphering a doctor’s handwriting.
The Tate gallery is to ask the public to make sense of some of the 17,000 hand-written letters and notebooks of British artists in its archive. If most are hard to read, some appear almost impossible.
“This will be the public as detectives,” said Jane Bramwell, head of the Tate Archive. “In getting them to help us by logging on to our new website, we are also encouraging them to get to know more about archives. They are interesting as social history.”
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Possibly the hardest to read are the letters of Walter Sickert, best known for his avant-garde paintings from the 1880s to the 1930s.
Darragh O’Donoghue, who works in the archive, said: “His writing is both spidery and creepy — so creepy you can see why he was accused of being Jack the Ripper.”
Sickert, who lived for a while in France, also used French words and phrases.
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Other hard-to-read artists include William Nicholson. He often wrote to his son, Ben, who became a famous artist too and was married to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Some of her letters are also in the archive.
Then there is the balloon-like writing of Francis Bacon in letters mainly to his dealer, Erica Brausen. Most include pleas for a loan or admissions that he was late in sending a picture. “The trouble with Bacon is he had very erratic schooling,” said O’Donoghue.
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The painter Paul Nash’s writing is hard to decipher as he drew caricatures by his words. “It is a bit of muddle,” said O’Donoghue. “He also wrote some sensual letters when he was courting the woman who became his wife.”
The Tate, working with the Oxford-based online research organisation Zooniverse, which has developed the transcription tool, will have its deciphering website, anno.tate.org.uk, going live from Tuesday.