Appointment and address books, 1980-1984

With the exception of the children's book, the items included here give further evidence to d'Harnoncourt's young artistic expression.

If it were not for her name written on the covers of the two undated sketchbooks, the drawings in each appear to be by two different hands. In the smaller book are a few sketches of hands, faces and figures apparently drawn from life. The larger book holds figures far more stylized and attenuated, similar to her father's drawing style and to the style of the fanciful doodles she would make on many of her meeting notes as an adult. In it, d'Harnoncourt also transcribed two French love songs, using her figures to illustrate the lyrics. Since this sketchbook is the same brand of notebook she used at Radcliffe, these sketches probably date from her undergraduate years. Most of the loose-leaf sketches in the second folder demonstrate yet another style of drawing. Part human, part animal or part male, part female, these surreal figures are truly fantastic and frightful flights of a young woman's fancy. Countering these images is a lifelike sketch of a man seated at a piano, and two caricatures of a gendarme and the face of an attractive woman who happens to have three eyes. All of these drawings were inserted in the March 6, 1962 issue of Harvard's Crimson Review.

As suggested by their titles, d'Harnoncourt's poetic topics were as varied as her styles of drawing. Included here are "The strangely disturbing tale of the key-collecting magpie," "Inundation," and "A valediction forbidding mourning for those living." It is unclear when she wrote these. Although the first two poems are similarly numbered (6.A and 6.C, respectively), the first was inserted in a Brearley school journal; the second, as well as third, were in a publication from her Radcliffe days.

With family ties to Austria and college-level studies in German literature and language, it is not surprising that d'Harnoncourt would have a 1948 illustrated children's book, "Die Prinzeffin auf der Erbfe" [The Princess and the Pea]. While it appears that a child's hand added color to some of the illustrated costumes and book cover, it is not known if this book was from d'Harnoncourt's childhood or a later keepsake acquisition.