Even Museums can make mistakes

[drc]

Last night I went to the Paul Gauguin exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. They had a line of his 'woodcuts,' but they were lithographs. They clearly weren't woodcuts, ala Harper's Woodcuts. Interestingly, a stranger woman next to me said she noticed it too. A pair of art geeks. I smilingly said to her "Our secret."

[RichardSimon]

I was at the Americana Museum branch of the Smithsonian in 2007.
They had on display a Brooklyn Dodgers signed baseball, problem was it was signed by the clubhouse attendant.

[Runscott]

Nice, but who spotted Gauguin's crapping dog?

[baseball tourist]

The HOF in Cooperstown had a mistake in their online material describing the items on display surrounding Thompson's "shot". They described the bat on display as a LVS when it actually is an Adirondack.

[yanks12025]

I don't know whether Ruth still used it, but in the hof they have a display with a Ruth game used bat yet it was a store model.

[mcgwirecom]

When Todd McFarland bought McGwire's 70th HR ball and a lot of other Sosa and Mac HR balls he sent them out on a publicity tour. He had a couple of McGwire and Sosa signed items on display with the balls that were terrible forgeries. I sent his company an email but don't know if they ever pulled them.

[bigtrain]

The Hall of Fame runs a film continuously in the Babe Ruth room. They show Babe running around the bases as the narrator talks about his hitting 60 home runs in 1927. The home run trot is not from 1927 though as the Yanks did not have numbers on their uniforms that year.

[barrysloate]

I once went to a museum in Florida that had an exhibit on the history of photography. There was one case that displayed what they called a group of daguerreotypes, but there were clearly ambrotypes mixed in. They are actually pretty easy to differentiate: dags will reflect like mirrors if you shift your angle, and that won't happen with ambros. I wanted to point out the mistake but I figured they wouldn't really care.

Went to the small, Roslyn Museum in Roslyn, Washington (better known as the set of the TV's Northern Exposure). Roslyn was the hometown of Jimmy Claxton's father William Edward Claxton (1862-1943). There, they had a couple photos of Jimmy Claxton, and a short biography which explained how he went by the name "Chief Yellowhorse" and pitched for the Cleveland Indians organization. Too many errors to count, it was quite comical.

I made a note of it and gathered some articles the next time I went. A couple of articles which referred to Claxton as "Dark Horse", and of course pointed out that Moses "Chief" Yellowhorse was a "real ballplayer", not Claxton. That took some doing. Also pointed out he only made it as far up as the PCL's Oakland Oaks, yes he played for the Indians, but the Nebraska Indians, etc..

Asked them where they got the information, "out of a book called "Roslyn", by Jaimi Trimble". I checked out the book and sure enough, Cleveland Indians, Chief Yellowhorse, and they only missed the year he passed by 30 years. How do these things get published?