Colors of Greece: The Art and Archaeology of Georg von Peschke

This drawing is a self-portrait of Peschke, who attacks a dragon with his paintbrush as sword and palette as shield. Peschke sent this cartoon to Gladys Davidson Weinberg, an archaeologist with whom he and his family were close. The dragon is probably the notoriously abrasive David Robinson, who was a professor at Johns Hopkins University and later the University of Mississippi (and had spent a year as a lecturer at Bryn Mawr in 1911–1912). Robinson was also director of the Olynthus excavations, where both Peschke and Weinberg worked.

Rhys Carpenter (1889–1980) taught Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr from 1914 to 1955 and excavated at Corinth in the 1920s and 1930s, where he hired Peschke as an illustrator. Peschke drew these silhouettes as entertainment in the evenings in Corinth. Nineteen of Peschke’s casual silhouettes of archaeologists survive at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.