ARTstor and the National Gallery of Art

ARTstor is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement with
the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) to collaborate on the
digitization and distribution through ARTstor of the Foto Reali
Archive, one of the most important photographic archives belonging to
the National Gallery of Art Library’s Department of Image Collections.

The National Gallery of Art Library’s Department of Image Collections
has unusually rich photographic archives. The Foto Reali Archive is
among those most prized by scholars, and as such it is routinely
consulted by art historians, art conservators and curators, historians
of art collecting, and other scholars. Foto Reali was a Florentine
photographic firm that surveyed private art collections as well as
dealer inventories in Italy in the early twentieth century, often
photographing the paintings in situ. Among the private collections
represented in the archive are such key collections as those assembled
by Harold Acton, Vittorio Cini, Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, Luigi
Grassi and Eugenio Ventura.

The contents of this important archive will greatly enrich ARTstor’s
value to a wide audience in the history of art and related fields,
especially students of Italian Renaissance painting. It closely
complements the Sansoni Archive at the Frick Art Reference Library,
concurrently being digitized for distribution through ARTstor. Everett
Fahy, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European
Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has studied the Foto
Reali Archive intensively. He stresses the documentary value of these
early photographs of Italian paintings. “Many of the early photographs
of paintings belonging to dealers show the paintings before they were
restored, often in their original frames,” says Fahy. “As many of the
works are unknown even to specialists,” adds David Alan Brown, the
National Gallery of Art’s Curator of Italian Paintings, “this vast
image collection holds out the promise of exciting discoveries."

In reaching this agreement, Neal Turtell, Executive Librarian,
National Gallery of Art, expressed his enthusiasm in collaborating to
use digital technologies to make these important scholarly resources
more broadly available for noncommercial pedagogical and scholarly
purposes. “The National Gallery of Art is excited to make the unique
contents of the Foto Reali Archive more accessible to the academic and
museum community. Our collaboration with ARTstor is a natural
outgrowth of Paul Mellon’s commitment to excellence in art historical
research,” commented Turtell. James Shulman, Executive Director of
ARTstor, adds, “The Foto Reali archive is a unique source of
information on early collections of Italian paintings. ARTstor is
delighted to be able to play a part in making it more easily
accessible for scholarly and educational purposes.”

The Department of Image Collections of the Library at the National
Gallery of Art is a study and research collection of images
documenting European and American art and architecture. Established in
1943, the collection now contains almost 10 million black-and-white
photographs, negatives, slides, and microform images of all aspects of
Western art.