Photograph Collections
The collections document works of art, architecture and material culture from the ancient world to the present and reflect the teaching and research of the History of Art and Architecture faculty and the Harvard University Art Museum’s curatorial staff during the first half of the 20th century. Image formats include photographic prints, lantern slides, 35mm slides, postcards, facsimiles and albums. Areas of strength include Western art and architecture (particularly medieval architecture and Renaissance and Baroque painting), Islamic art and architecture, and Asian art and architecture. The collection includes many nineteenth-century images that are of interest as historic photographs. The core of the collection is represented by cataloged photographs arranged by medium (architecture, sculpture, painting, decorative arts), then by culture or country, location, and/or artist. Some collections have been acquired and maintained as archives of the work of distinguished photographers including Wayne Andrews, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Clarence Kennedy, Ralph Lieberman, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Josephine Powell, Judith Hancock Sandoval and Langdon Warner.
Notable collections include:
- Corpus Photographicum of Drawings (Gernsheim)
Over 175,000 black-and-white photographs of drawings in European collections - Courtauld Photographic Survey of Private Collections
25,000 black- and-white photographs of art in English country houses and private collections - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reference Collection
30,000 black and white photographs from MFA's collections arranged by department - Decimal Index to the Art of the Low Countries (D.I.A.L.)
12,000 black and white photographs of the, arranged by Iconclass number - Reproductions of photographs in Bernard Berenson’s photographic archive at Villa I Tatti
37,000 black and white photographs from the reference collection of Bernard Berenson
Additionally an extensive set of images is available in microform, including sets such as the Witt Library photographic collection, the Conway Library photographic collection, the Alinari archive, and the Marburger Index.
Arrangement
The cataloged collection is arranged by medium. In-house finding aids are available for some special collections, others are self-indexing with finding aids in process. HOLLIS and VIA records for most collections are available.
Finding Aids
HOLLIS and VIA records for most collections are available; a card catalog provides access to the cataloged collection and in-house finding aids. Some materials are cataloged individually and available digitally in VIA.
- For more information about collections, please contact us via email.
