Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) Data Sample
The Yale Center for British Art is one of fourteen institutions participating in the Pharos photoarchive consortium.The data presented here is for 82,000 cataloged photographs held by the Center. Around 50,000 photographs remain uncataloged. The data is currently held in a Microsoft Access database and is only accessible on site.
The photo archive consists of black and white photographs after works by British artists or other artists working in the UK from c. 1500 until 1945. The vast majority of the works of art in the archive were created before 1900. British artists are the overwhelming focus of the archive but it also includes Irish, Scottish, and Australian artists. Included in the Archive are paintings, drawings, watercolors, sculpture, and a small percentage of prints. It does not include architecture, manuscript illumination or decorative arts. The photos were acquired (from 1975 until 2000) from public and private collections, galleries, and auction houses in the UK and North America, often in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre in London.
One of the unique aspects of the archive is the subject access to works of art. Each image averages four subjects and can have as many as twelve. The subject authority list was created locally and derived from Elizabeth Glass's Subject Index for the Visual Arts (V&A, 1969); Decimal index of the art of the Low Countries; D.l.A.L. (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, 1971); and lconoclass: an iconographic classification system (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1979).