Worked example · Art · Year 9
DCF: Producing → Sourcing, searching and planning digital content
A secure Year 9 response, annotated so you can see which success criterion each part meets. It is also your answer key for Part C: 1908 (first version) and 1909 (second version), never 1911 · watercolour · the 1908 version is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (object LL 3446), the 1909 version is owned by the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, which bought it in October 2019 · Vosper denied hiding a devil, and no result supports “banned”. Copyright ended at the end of 31 December 2012.
| Order | Exactly what I would type or do | What I am hoping this search finds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reverse image search with Mali's cropped picture. | The full, uncropped painting and the name of the painting, so I have real words to search with instead of the caption. |
| 2 | "Salem" Vosper painting chapel | Pages that give the artist, the date and who owns it. I would also try “Sidney”, because the name is spelled both ways. |
| 3 | Salem Vosper site:library.wales and then Salem Vosper site:liverpoolmuseums.org.uk | The collections' own pages, which are first-hand, with an object number. |
I would leave out “devil”, “hidden” and “1911”. They come from the caption, which has no source, so they would mostly find more posts repeating the same myth and the wrong date.
Three stages from broad to precise, a reverse image search first to turn a picture into searchable words, exact-phrase and site: searches, and a sensible reason for dropping the caption's words. Evidences criterion 1.
| Result | Who made it, and why? | First- or second-hand? | Gets right | Gets wrong or leaves out | Trust |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | An account that wants likes and followers. | Second-hand | It is a Welsh chapel painting. | Wrong date, no artist, no source; “banned” is unsupported; the crop hides the clock. | 1 |
| 2 | A shop that wants to sell prints. | Second-hand | Title, artist and 1908. | Says oil. Colours are changed. Claims “all rights reserved” over a painting it does not own. | 2 |
| 3 | National Museums Liverpool, which holds the 1908 painting, to explain its collection. | First-hand | 1908, the chapel, LL 3446, Lever's purchase, Vosper's own denial of the devil. | Its note that the second version is “on loan to the National Museum of Wales” has no date and is out of date. | 5 |
| 4 | The National Library of Wales, which bought the 1909 version, announcing the purchase. | First-hand | Two versions exist; theirs is 1909; it is in Aberystwyth; dated 10 October 2019. | Says little about the 1908 version. | 5 |
| 5 | Wikipedia volunteers, summarising other sources. | Second-hand | Everything agrees with 3 and 4, and it has footnotes to check. | Anyone can edit it, so I use it to find sources, not as my source. | 4 |
| 6 | A chatbot predicting a likely-sounding answer. | Second-hand, with no sources | Title and 1908. | Oil, “Welsh artist” and Cardiff are all wrong. | 1 |
| 7 | A search tool matching pixels. | Neither — it is a tool, not a source | Finds the uncropped image and shows there are two versions. | Cannot say which page is reliable. | 3 |
Every row names a purpose, not just an owner, and the first-hand column is right for all seven, including the subtle point that a reverse image search is a tool rather than a source. Evidences criterion 2.
C1. There are two dates, both right: the first version was painted in 1908 (results 3 and 5) and the second in 1909 (results 4 and 5). No result that gives a source says 1911, so the caption's date is wrong. It may have been mixed up with a later Vosper painting or just made up; either way nobody checked it.
C2. It is a watercolour. The National Library's education page calls it one (result 4). “Oil” only appears in the print shop and the chatbot (results 2 and 6), which are the two sources with no reason to be careful: one is selling canvas prints, and the other is guessing the most likely words.
C3. The sources are describing two different paintings. The 1908 original is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, object number LL 3446 (results 3 and 5). The 1909 version belongs to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, which bought it in October 2019 (results 4 and 5). Result 3 says the second version is on loan to the National Museum of Wales, but that sentence has no date, and result 4 is dated 2019 and is written by the owner, so result 4 wins. The chatbot (result 6) is wrong: the Cardiff museum does not own either version.
C4. No. The museum that owns the painting quotes Vosper's own letter from 1940 saying the devil was not deliberate, “of course it was not!” (result 3). Wikipedia calls the face an example of pareidolia, where people see faces in random patterns (result 5). “Banned in Wales” appears only in result 1, with no source, and the opposite is true: Lever used the picture to sell soap and it hung in homes all over Wales.
Each answer names the proving results, explains why the wrong source went wrong, and C3 resolves the apparent contradiction by spotting two versions and weighing a dated, first-hand page over an undated one. Evidences criteria 3 and 4.
| Artist | Sydney Curnow Vosper (1866–1942), also spelled Sidney |
|---|---|
| Title | Salem |
| Date | 1908 (first version) |
| Medium | Watercolour |
| Held by | Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (National Museums Liverpool) |
| Object number | LL 3446 |
| Where my image came from | https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/salem, looked at on the date of this lesson |
Vosper died in 1942. 1942 + 70 = 2012, and copyright runs to the end of that calendar year, so it ended on 31 December 2012. The painting has been out of copyright in the UK since 1 January 2013. The print shop cannot own the painting by writing “all rights reserved”; that line can only cover its own words and page design. I should still check the museum website's terms before I reuse its photograph online, but for my sketchbook I can use it.
A complete record that someone else could use to find the exact object, and a correct copyright calculation with the end-of-year rule applied. Evidences criteria 5 and 6.