LibGuides: Art & Art History: Primary Sources

Primary Source Databases

Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
A searchable archive of leading women’s interest magazines, dating from the 19th century through to the 21st. It provides access to the backfiles of the foremost titles of this type, including Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day, which serve as canonical records of evolving assumptions about gender roles and cultural mores.

Atlantic magazine archive, 1857-2014
Provides access to articles and images from Atlantic Magazine Archive. Contains publications from 1857-2014

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) I & II This link opens in a new window
Includes significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. Subject categories include the fine arts.
Eighteenth Century Journals This link opens in a new window
Brings together rare journals printed between c1685 and 1815, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Topics include: the French Revolution; the theater; fashion throughout Europe; the origins and rise of Romanticism, and more.

Life Magazine Archive
The Archive provides access to articles and images from Life Magazine, the famed photojournalism publication. Contains issues from 1936-2000.

London Low Life This link opens in a new window
Containing color digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 19th and early 20th century London.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents from the nineteenth century.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Historical Newspapers offers full-text and full-image articles for selected newspapers dating back to the late 18th century. For most titles, the collection includes digital reproductions of every page from every issue in the stated time period, cover to cover, in downloadable PDF files.
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels This link opens in a new window
Primary source database focusing on North American and European adult comic books and graphic novels. The collection includes original material from the 1960s to today along with interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines.
Victorian Popular Culture This link opens in a new window
Electronic collection of rare books, posters and manuscripts relating to the history of spiritualism, magic and popular entertainment in the United Kingdom, United States and Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vogue Archive
Contains the backfile of Vogue magazine (US edition), spanning the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images.

Primary Source Websites

Digital.Bodleian
Discover over a million images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries. .
Digital Public Library of America
Discover over 44,000,000 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
Europeana: Art
Discover art, artists and stories in the digitized collections of European museums, galleries, libraries and archives.

Primary Sources at Skidmore

Special Collections: Rare Books & College Archives
Our rare books collection encompasses numerous small named collections of rare books as well as an artists’ books collection. The archives is limited to materials directly related to Skidmore.

Tang Museum
The Tang's collection includes more than 16,000 objects representing a wide variety of materials, subject matter, and time periods.
Artstor: Tang Teaching Museum Collection
Skidmore community members and visiting researchers can explore more of the Tang’s collection on Artstor. This collection is central to the museum’s mission of object-based learning and a stimulus for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. It includes more than 16,000 objects representing a wide variety of materials, subject matter, and time periods. It is filled with oddities of material culture and masterworks by renowned contemporary artists alike.

Lucy Scribner Library