Art & Architectural History

Oxford Art Online combines several key encyclopedias and dictionaries important for the history of art and architecture. Together these provide the largest and most authoritative list of biographies of artists in English, as well as an excellent collection of scholarly encyclopedia articles on important topics in the visual arts. Included are Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and others.

The ARTstor Digital Library is an image database featuring works of art and other cultural heritage from some of the world's leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists in one easily-navigated repository. The library of 2 million images is constantly growing. All images are accompanied by extensive metadata and are rights-cleared for specified educational uses.

Indexes hundreds of international art magazines, including English-language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, as well as some published in other languages. Indexing is available for publications 1929+; abstracting for 1994+, and Full Text is often available for 1997+ but keyword searches do not explore the full texts – only the titles, subject headings, & etc.. Not covered by LionSearch.

Contains descriptions of articles on the history and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, historic preservation, furniture, and interior design and decoration in more than 700 international magazines. Most indexing began with 1934, but some titles are indexed to dates as early as 1741. Updated weekly.

ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM) indexes publications about art from the late 19th century to the present, providing full abstracts of journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogs, PhD dissertations, and exhibition reviews. Approximately 12-13,000 new entries are added each year. Entries date back as far as the late 1960s.

Indexing for European art from late antiquity to the present, American art from the colonial era to the present. Strong on topics before 1945. With indexing beginning in 2007, this is the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA.)

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization that provides a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and a selection of scholarly books. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. While indexing for JSTOR articles is covered in LionSearch, the full text of the articles is not searched in LionSearch. Search JSTOR itself to ensure detailed coverage of full texts.

Brief essays by experts on major topics in the history of art and architecture. Each essay selects and describes the important scholarship on the topic. Topics include eras, media, national styles, movements, and a selection of important artists. Items in the annotated bibliographies usually link to library holdings.

This database provides access to descriptions of the published catalogs of nearly 65,500 art auctions held between 1616 and 1900 in dozens of countries throughout Europe and North America. These sales included art in all media and many cultures. Most of the catalogs listed have been scanned and those scans may be viewed, searched by keywords, and downloaded as zip files containing separate jpegs for each page. Many of the catalogues contain annotations indicating the prices obtained for individual works. The database also acts as a listing of libraries that have copies of these catalogs. It is based upon an earlier bibliographic project: Frits Lugt, /Répertoire des catalogues de ventes…/

This site offers a variety of art market information. The main feature is a database with millions of records of prices realized at auctions for works by nearly 800,000 artists. These sales records go back to the 1980s. Many records contain brief biographies of the artists and small images of the works. In the “Archives” section of the site, earlier sales records are found, including scanned pages from the Mayer auction index which was published from 1962 through 1987 (each annual volume must be consulted separately) and the Mireur dictionary of a selection of auctions held between 1700 and 1900. Some simple statistical data is offered for many of the artists. The site also contains summaries of annual trends, news stories, forthcoming sales, and other market information.