Ellen Prokop

Ellen Prokop is the Associate Photoarchivist at the Frick Art Reference Library. For more information, see her biography.

Piero della Francesca's St. Julian In Situ

In 1956, Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, traveled to Sansepolcro, Italy, to study and photograph works by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492), including a recently discovered fresco in the church of Santa Chiara (formerly Sant’Agostino).
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A St. Ursula by Valentin de Boulogne?

A painting of St. Ursula originally attributed to Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) is more likely a work by another Caravaggesque master, the French artist known as Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632).
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The Future of Photoarchives

In late January 2013, the representatives of fourteen photoarchives based in Europe and the United States met for two days to discuss future plans for their collections.
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The Allegorical Frescoes of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua

The theme of this extensive fresco cycle—which is comprised of more than 300 scenes—is human life as regulated by the heavens.
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St. Lawrence Recovered

The Photoarchive allows researchers to trace the history of a work of art; the image of St. Lawrence by Niccolò di Buonaccorso of Siena reproduced at left offers an instructive example of this crucial aspect of our collection.
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Forgotten Folk Songs

In 1932 Juliana Force, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, commissioned Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) to create a series of eight murals for the library of the museum. While six panels from this series survive, two ceiling panels are unlocated. It is feared that they have been destroyed.
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The Parthenon in 1667

This detailed sketch, based on George Wheeler’s topographical drawing of 1667, documents the appearance of the Parthenon just a few years before Venetian forces shelled the Acropolis during the Republic’s struggle to take the city from the Ottomans in 1687.
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Drawing Lost in Spanish Civil War

This stunning pen and wash drawing of the Coronation of the Virgin signed by the seventeenth-century Spanish master Francisco Herrera the Younger (called "el Mozo") was part of a valuable collection of drawings housed in the Real Instituto de Jovellanos in Gijón, Spain, that was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. This rare photograph is one of the few surviving documents of this dynamic composition, which may have been an early "draft" of an altarpiece submitted for a patron's approval.

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