Photoarchive

Discover a newly digitized book of engravings of views of Paris from the 1780s, the product of a collaborative project by the four summer 2022 interns at the Frick Art Reference Library.

Reproductions in the Frick’s Photoarchive allow us to piece together a full visual history of Raphael’s Baronci Altarpiece, the first recorded commission of the High Renaissance master. The altarpiece—today found only in fragments—sat peacefully for nearly three hundred years until a devastating earthquake and looting by Napoleon changed its fate permanently.

The Camposanto complex in Pisa, Italy, housed some of the most significant fresco paintings from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—until their near destruction during World War II. The Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive contains images from before the damage and prior to extensive restoration efforts, providing a window into a crucial period in the site’s long history.

An image held in the Frick’s Photoarchive shows a statue of King Louis XII of France standing in regal bearing. At the Louvre today, you’ll find the sculpture displayed in three separate pieces. In this post, learn about the moment captured in the Photoarchive and its place in the object’s turbulent physical history.

Emma Claire Marvin, a spring/summer 2021 practicum student and content consultant in the Frick Art Reference Library, explains her work on the library’s ongoing Wikidata project. The project enhances the online discoverability of artists represented in the Photoarchive, and Emma Claire describes her research that contributed to the creation of a brand-new Wikidata “item” for lesser-known French artist Marie Perrier (1864–1941).

In February 2021, the Frick Art Reference Library announced the completion of a massive, three-year project to digitize the library’s historic Photoarchive collection. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this initiative has made records and images for more than 175,000 works of art available in the Frick Digital Collections, NYARC Discovery, and the library’s online catalog.

As part of the preparations for its centennial celebrations in 2022, the Frick Art Reference Library is partnering with Global Art Access to digitize 100 paintings in private collections that were first captured by photographers hired by the Frick from the 1920s to the 1960s.

To enhance the discoverability of Photoarchive materials, the library launched a collaboration with the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, City University of New York in 2014 to develop an interactive digital map that traces the movement of library staff and photographers as they traveled across the United States and recorded paintings and sculptures in private homes and little-known public collections.

Ars Longa is a blog series exploring lost, altered, and destroyed works of art that are preserved in the records of the Frick's Photoarchive. In this post, the Photoarchive helps us uncover the complex history of a painting by the circle of Peter Paul Rubens, two separate panels of which today reside in two different museums.

Among the many images reproduced in the collection of the Frick Art Reference Library's Photoarchive is a stunning likeness of a vivacious young woman in a feathered hat. Thanks to the Library's photographic campaigns, the true identity of the sitter as well as the correct attribution of the portrait are part of the art-historical record.