Scholars in multiple disciplines around the world have
long heralded the Photoarchive of the Frick Art Reference
Library as uniquely valuable to research that relates to
object-oriented study of works of art. Without this
repository of an estimated 1.2 million images of works
created by more than 40,000 artists, curators, art dealers,
and authors of monographic catalogues would be hard
pressed to find visual documentation of unpublished art
and the preparatory studies, versions, copies, or forgeries
that relate to those and even to more famous works. In
recent years, the Frick’s Photoarchive has also played a key role in helping researchers compile
provenance information about art looted during World War II. Lynn Nicholas, the highly respected
author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World
War (New York, 1994), recently noted that “to do provenance research, of course, one of the very first
places to go is the Frick...” Until now, online access to these valuable resources has been limited to
searches for the artists’ files, the results of which indicate the amount of material the Photoarchive has for
a given artist, but no specific information about individual works of art. For that, researchers had to visit
the Library premises, and manually browse the photographs stored on file