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Images: Paintings, Pictures, Illustrations, Photographs, Sculpture
The keyword, "Boston," was used to search many of the online image databases listed below to give some idea of the quality and quantity of the images retrieved. Researchers, typically, will search for a specific building, place, or work of art.
Aerial Photography, search "Boston." MIT Libraries' Dome. new (Licensed for MIT use only)
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920: "Boston". A collection of lantern slides digitized by the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design for the Library of Congress' American Memory web site. 395 items offer views of Boston, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens, including a complete history of Boston's park system. Also some plans, maps, and models.
AP Images BU. "Associated Press' current year's photo report and a selection of images from their vast negative and print library dating from the 1840s."
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955: "Boston". 67 photographs including interior views of Guild House, Jordan Marsh, Best & Co., and the Animal Rescue League.
Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts, search "Boston." MIT Libraries' Dome. new (The images in this collection are licensed for MIT use only.)
ARTstor BU For best results, use Advanced Search.
Boston African Americana Project, Boston Athenaeum. " Coordinated by the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston African Americana Project gathers visual and textual materials held by the Athenaeum, the Bostonian Society, Historic New England, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Digitized materials relating to African Americans fall broadly within the categories of slavery, the abolition movement, free blacks, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, rural life, urban life, social life, advertising, and depictions of men, women, and children, and consist of broadsides, caricatures, illustrations, manuscripts, pamphlets, political cartoons, portraits, and views. The database contains images and transcriptions of over five hundred items spanning the years 1770 to 1950, with the bulk of the collection falling around 1865."
Boston and Vicinity, American stereoscopic views. New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Boston Architecture Reference File. Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. This is "a card index of references to written descriptions, critiques, histories, illustrations, renderings and plans of Boston buildings and their architects. Most references are to published sources, although they may refer to original photographs, architectural drawings and other unpublished materials in the collections of this and other libraries."
Boston Art Archives/New England Art Information File. Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. This file, begun in 1885 as a vertical file of ephemera on Boston artists, has expanded to cover New England artists, as well as contemporary artists across the country who are not adequately covered in reference sources. The file includes "exhibition announcements, calendars of events, gallery/organization newsletters, press releases, reviews of exhibitions, checklists and small exhibition catalogs, obituaries, illustrations, gallery histories, bibliographies on artists, and miscellaneous biographical information." Also indexed are the records of individual artists exhibiting in shows of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, the Boston Society of Independent Artists, and the Boston Art Club.
Boston at the Movies: First Films of the City, 1901-1905. Boston Public Library. Flickr.
Boston Buildings Guide to Researching, State Library of Massachusetts. An annotated list of resources located in public and private collections, e.g., the Boston Landmarks Commission and the Inspectional Services Department, a repository for all building permits issued from 1886 to the present.
Boston Gas Company Photographs. John J. Burns Library, Boston College. This collection of approximately 4,500 photographs documents various construction projects and provides candid portraits of employees at work and at company sponsored social activities. Almost 400 images, dating from 1882 to 1972, are available on the Web. The browser, Internet Explorer, must be used to retrieve images.
Boston Herald Traveler Morgue. Print Department, Boston Public Library This collection contains nearly 700,000 photographs (not all of Boston) taken between 1920 and 1972.
Boston Historical Society. Over 3,000 online photographs of Boston streetscapes and views. Search the photograph collection.
Boston Illustrated. Edward Stanwood. 1873. (Internet Archive)
"Boston" in Art Inventories Catalog, Smithsonian American Art Museum. List of nearly 200 works of art, mainly paintings, depicting Boston scenes by well-known artists, such as Hassan and Prendergast, and less well-known artists, such as Coates and Goodwin, mainly from the 19th century. Brief catalog records providing basic information and current owner. No online images. For illustration(s) of the art work, click on its title; the record may provide a reference to illustration(s) in a journal, book, etc.
Boston Photos and Webcams, Boston Online. Historic photos and Photos of public figures.
Boston (Mass.) -- Pictorial Works. Books in Boston University Libraries.
Boston Pictorial Archive. Print Department, Boston Public Library This is the "largest public collection of photographs of Boston in earlier days."
Boston Picture File. Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. This file consists of mounted and unmounted photographs and clippings about Boston buildings, parks, monuments, streets, etc. The material is indexed in the Boston Architecture Reference File. A postcard collection of about 1,500 items depicting Boston buildings is included.
Boston Public Art Walk. Boston Art Commission. Map, key, and images.
Boston Public Library's photostream on Flickr. Among the sets are Old Boston Photographs, Boston Stereographs, McGreevey Collection (baseball), Trustees' McKim Construction, Boston Brewery Posters, postcards. BPL Photostream.
Boston Streets: Mapping Directory Data , Tufts University; places, people, moments, cowpaths, Civil War through 20th century.
Built in America Historic American Buildings Survey [HABS]/Historic American Engineering Record [HAER]1933-Present: "Boston". 159 Boston properties, including private homes, commercial and municipal buildings, churches, and bridges, have been added to the collections in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress documenting architecture, engineering, and design accomplishments in the United States. Search also by neighborhood, e.g., " Roxbury " or "Suffolk County MA." Full-text records online.
Cities and Buildings Database, University of Washington, Digital Collections. Search city "Boston" retrieves views with descriptive material of Boston City Hall, Boston Public Library, and the Boston Company Building.
City Seen, The. Boston Globe. "Over the course of two years, Globe photographer Suzanne Kreiter captured hidden views, seldom-seen images, and unexpected sounds around Greater Boston." Includes audio.
Cumulus Image Database. Art History Department, Boston University. BU
A Digital Archive of American Architecture: Boston Architecture, Jeffery Howe, Boston College. Mainly recent photographs of significant buildings from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Includes a history of the landfills project and old postcard and current views of Copley Square.
Farber Gravestone Collection, David Rumsey, American Antiquarian Society. 1,059 photographs of gravestones in Boston and the neighborhoods. Click on Browser, then search by keywords=Boston. Double click on image for larger version and for additional image data (click on icon).
Frederick Law Olmsted: Boston's Emerald Necklace, Library of Congress. A page from the American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920 study collection of the Harvard School of Design.
Frederick Law Olmsted: Boston's Emerald Necklace, Christopher Glenn Parker. A page from a comprehensive site devoted to the life and works of Frederick Law Olmsted. Also links to short descriptions of Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Pond, Franklin Park, Muddy River, and Back Bay Fens.
Great Buildings in Boston, Kevin Matthews and Artifice, Inc. General interest site with photographs, commentary, and bibliography of 10 buildings including Fanueil Hall, 1762, 1805, 1971-1976; Hancock Place, and the New England Aquarium.
Great Fire of 1872, resources from the making of the documentary, "Damrell's Fire," for public television, April 2006. Many photographs from the Boston Public Library's Boston Pictorial Archive.
Harvard University Art Museum Collections Online. Search title or full text for "Boston."
Heart of the City: Connecting People and Neighborhoods, Harvard University, photos and maps.
Images of America Series: Boston. Dover, N.H. and Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, various dates. Photographic books of Boston and its neighborhoods.
Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts
This collection offers digital images of 840 visual materials that illustrate the role of Massachusetts (especially Boston) in the national debate over slavery. Included are photographs, paintings, sculptures, engravings, artifacts, banners, and broadsides that were central to the debate and formation of the antislavery movement.Internet Archive. Mainly books. Use Advanced Search for best keyword results. To find books on Boston contributed by the Boston Public Library, type Boston in the title field and BPL in the contributor field.
The Kidder Smith Slide Archives on American Architecture: Massachusetts: "Boston", M.I.T., Rotch Visual Collections. Captions and color slides of 14 Boston buildings photographed by G. E. Kidder Smith, architect,architectural photographer and author of the major survey of American architecture: Architecture of the United States: An Illustrated Guide to Notable Buildings, Open to the Public
(Mugar Ref X NA705 .S578).Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Search title "Boston" yields over 275 items including paintings, sketches, and photographs, that have a Boston motif or subject. 199 images available online.
New York Public Library's Picture Collection: Boston. Prints from the folder, "American History--1775," includes depictions of the Boston Massacre, Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Boston Tea Party.
Panoramic Views of Boston, American Memory, Library of Congress. Four views taken from the Ames Building in 1894 and 124 other scenes.
Penny Postscards from Massachusetts: Suffolk County." These postcards cost 1¢ to mail. Postage was temporarily raised to 2¢ from 1917 to 1919 to cover the cost of World War I & from 1925 to 1928..."
Perceptual Form of the City. MIT Libraries' Dome. "The objects in this collection relate to Kevin Lynch's study The Perceptual Form of the City, conducted in Boston, Massachusetts from 1954-1959." " The print photographs are available in the Rotch Visual Collections." new
Photographs. Books in the Boston University Libraries.
Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index (AECI), by Smithsonian American Art Museum: "Boston in art work title." 150 titles. AECI indexes "artworks exhibited in the United States and Canada up through 1876 (the Centennial year)." NO ONLINE IMAGES.
Prints & Photographs (Library of Congress) Online Catalog. Search subject "Boston" yields 500 images, including those from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), of various buildings and scenes. Over 300 additional items are related in some way to Boston although sometimes only as the location of the item. For WPA art, search "WPA and Boston."
"Re-imagining Boston's City Hall building," Casey Ross and Marino Eccher, Boston Globe, April 7, 2010. See related links following the article.
Reviving Boston's Marketplace, by Benjamin Thompson, 1975. (Internet Archive)
Save America's Treasures: Massachusetts, a public private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture Catalogs. Search title keyword "Boston" yields almost 800 records of art works in public and private collections-- NO ONLINE IMAGES.
SPIRO, Architecture Visual Resources Library, University of California, Berkeley. "SPIRO contains surrogate images of photographs and drawings from approximately 2,000 books, 200 periodical titles, and 100 postcards, posters, and calendars. SPIRO also contains surrogate representations of slides from 25 slide vendors and 220 donors." Search LOCATION="Boston" yields over 200 images of Boston buildings with documentation.
Sports Temples of Boston: Images of Historic Ballparks, Arenas, and Stadiums: 1872-1972, Boston Public Library.
Two Hundred Views of Boston and Historical Surroundings: reproduced from the latest photographs (1907) (Internet Archive)
Turn-of- the-Century Boston, American Memory, Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, 1880-1920.