Acquisitions from Outside Sources
In the early 1920s the Library
began purchasing photographs from American and European photographers and
museums, often through the agency of scholars and other art professionals including
Clotilde Brière-Mismé in Paris and José Gudiol in Barcelona. Today the Photoarchive continues to buy new
photographs from independent photographers and small museums whose collections may
never be published and receives thousands of photographs and digital images
from donors every year.
More than 200,000 photographs have been
acquired through subscriptions to the Gernsheim Corpus Photographicum of Drawings; the
Courtauld Institute of Art Photographic Survey, the latter founded in the 1950s
in conjunction with the Library; and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Photographic Survey, which the Library sponsored for many years.
In recognition
of the Library’s contribution to the scholarly community, many museums, including
the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, and The Art Institute of Chicago, have donated photographs and digital
images. In 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave the Library its entire
photoarchive of 47,000 photographs of works of art by more than 5,000 artists.
A number of scholars have given photographs
and research documentation to the Library over the years, including Everett
Fahy, Millard Meiss, Juliette Tomlinson, and Federico Zeri. In 2009
alone, the Library received more than 1,500 digital files from independent
researchers.
Thousands of photographs and color
transparencies have been donated by art galleries and dealers, documenting
works as they passed through the twentieth-century art market, often in transit
from one private collection to another. These dealers include Coe Kerr
Gallery, Peter H. Davidson, R. Langton Douglas, Durand-Ruel Gallery, Erich
Galleries, Ferargil Galleries, Daniel Grossman Gallery, Hirschl & Adler
Galleries, Kennedy Galleries, Knoedler & Company, Milch Galleries, Frederick
G. Schab, Schaeffer Galleries, and Shepherd Gallery.
Joseph Whiting Stock photographs, gift of Juliette Tomlinson, former Director of the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum in Springfield, MA, included correspondence and attributions from the scholar. Left to right: Joseph Whiting Stock (1815–1855), Boy with Book and Apple, undated, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 91.44 cm, Richard Gachot, Westbury, New York; Jasper Raymond Rand, 1844, oil on canvas, 116.84 x 102.87 cm, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey, 35.40. Photographs: Juliette Tomlinson, 1986 |
