History of Art Department Image Archives
Bartsch Archive
This is composed of 30 solander boxes of mounted photographs and 12 crates and a box full of smaller boxes of unmounted photographs of prints from Bartsch’s Le peintre-graveur. There is no explanatory material and it is not clear whether it is complete.
Beal Collection
This collection of just over 12,000 postcards was presented to the Department in about 1972 by Dr James Beal, who had amassed them over many years. It is indexed in the Thematic index of the Photographic Archive. It comprises 26 catalogue drawers, some in 4-drawer boxes, some single drawer units. It is quite carefully sorted but there is no handlist.
Braun Photographs
This collection comprises 125 loose mounted photographic reproductions (using a carbon printing process) of the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
“Braun was an ambitious and enterprising businessman, establishing one of the largest photographic publishing houses in the world, identifying new uses for photography, and reaching the widest possible audience.” (Image and Enterprise: The Photographs of Adolphe Braun, Cleveland Museum of Art, June 18-August 27, 2000).
This complete set is housed in 6 leather bound volumes which appear to have been custom made and which carry the coat of arms of the Eldon family: since Lord Eldon was one of the major benefactors of Michelangelo and Raphael drawings to the Ashmolean in 1846, it may be assumed that this boxed set was either donated by or purchased from him/ his family.
It was originally housed in the Ashmolean Library and was moved to the History of Art Department in Spring 2003. The boxes themselves were restored in the same year and the prints themselves are in good condition.
Calman Collection
This collection is still much unexplored. Calman was a dealer in Old Master drawings, who took a photograph of every item which passed through his hands. Most items are properly accessioned in the Photographic Archive, but there is a large box of possible duplicates.
Cohn Bequest:
This collection is an image archive dating in the main from the turn of the 20th century, compiled, probably for his doctoral research, by William Cohn, who was later on the staff of the Ashmolean Museum’s Department of Eastern Art and died in 1961. The collection comprises 3 folios and about 300 smaller folders arranged in gray cartridge paper folders under 62 subheadings, lettered in two distinctive late nineteenth century hands. There is an index in a red hardcover account book by one of the same hands. The collection is housed in plastic openwork stacking crates and is in good condition for its age.
The material is taken from art educational publications of the time: Georg Hirth’s Formenschatz; eine Quelle der Belehrung und Anregung fur Kunstler und Gewerktreibende, Die Baukunst, Ruckwardt’s Architekturschatz, for example and museum publications: Handzeichnungen alter Meister aus der Albertina, Meisterwerke der Bildschnitzerkunst from the Germanische Nationalmuseum inNurembergand similar. Cohn removed his material from the looseleaf portfolios in which it was published and rearranged it according to his own system, supplementing it with additions of his own and probably using it as basis for student worknotes and revision.
Delaisse Collection
This collection of largely medieval subject matter in several different forms came to the Library on the death of M.J.L. Delaisse, Fellow of All Souls, in 1972. There is a collection of glass slides and a large Victorian slide cabinet of 35 mm slides in the slide library: this material has not been classified. There is an index, filling 5 wooden drawers. Dr Martin Kauffmann, of the Department of Western Manuscripts in Bodley, examined it in May 2000 and advised that it did not directly relate to the arrangement of books or slides. According to him, it was an index of an unusual kind, in that it was Delaisse’s work notes for his field of research which was medieval illuminations, arranged in the form of an index.
Durand-Ruel prints
These are a set of mounted photographic prints of Impressionist paintings representing the stock of the art dealer Durand-Ruel and date to c.1890. They include works by Cassatt, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes and Renoir from the Galerie Durand-Ruel. There are 50 plates each 30 x 24 cm marked 'Durand-Ruel, Éditeur, Paris-New York' in lower right-hand margin.
Harris Manchester albums
A series of three (possibly unrelated) oversized photographic albums containing late 19thC prints of European art and architecture, the majority acquired from commercial producers, in varying states of condition. They were donated to the ‘Ashmolean Photograph Library’ in 1996 by the then librarian of Harris Manchester who found them in an attic room of the college.
Heinemann Photographs
These are a collection of three boxes of prints, mainly of Italian painting purchased from commercial publishers such as Alinari and Anderson, collected by Professor F H Heinemann and donated to the department in 1975.
Lee Johnson Archive
Lee Johnson was a leading authority on the French painter Eugène Delacroix. The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: a critical catalogue was published by Oxford University Press in three instalments of two volumes each, one for the text and one for the plates: the first two in 1981 and the last two in 1989. His archive contains all of his files, photographs, notes, correspondence, catalogues and research material & documents relating to Delacroix.
Parker Collection (on loan from the Dept of Antiquities, Ashmolean Museum)
The Parker collection is a series of items collected and donated by the former Keeper of the Ashmolean, John Henry Parker. It appears that these commissioned photographs from Italy have been catalogued several times both partially and fully by different individuals.
The collection is obviously a useful compilation of photographs of early excavation sites as well as the artefacts themselves. It also contains many depictions of now-lost artefacts, artefacts in situ, and artefacts in displays at certain museums which may have subsequently been changed.
Photographic Archive
The Photographic archive, which is more properly described as an image collection, comprises about 600 boxes, containing mainly B & W photographs (although the occasional colour print too) of approximately 140,000 images of works of art and architecture. There are also Author, Thematic & location card index catalogues for this photographic collection and a similar card index for English Portraits.
Reitlinger Bequest
Gerald Roberts Reitlinger was a scholar of the economics of art and of history, particularly the Holocaust. His collection of Islamic, Japanese and Chinese porcelain was willed to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, where a gallery is named in his honour. The material in the HoA collection comprises two solander boxes containing loose prints and photos of medieval manuscripts, painting and sculpture. A similar box of materials marked ‘Reitlinger’ is located in the Rare Books Room in the Sackler Library.
Additional unidentified photographic albums
Also housed in the HoA photographic archive are a number of unidentified photographic albums (mainly containing late 19thC/ early 20thC albumen prints), six of which arrived in the department in February 2009 from Nuneham Courtney. There is also an anonymous donation of a collection of six albums of B & W photos of European architecture dating from the 1930s-1950s.
Departmental slide collections
In addition to the photographic archives, the department has a collection of c.180,000 35mm slides and c.60,000 3 ¼ “ plate glass lantern slides. The latter are a mixture of slides made at the request of Professor Wind (presumably by the Ashmolean Photographic Dept) and others acquired by the V & A Museum. There are also a very small number of hand-painted lantern slides.
In order to view any of the above collections, please contact:
Vicky Brown, Visual Resources Curator
Visual Resources Centre
History of Art Department
Suite 9, Littlegate House
St Ebbes
Oxford OX1 1PT
Tel: 01865 286839
Email: