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Collection Overview
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
Nearly twenty years after the close of the Civil War, two editors of the monthly periodical Century Magazine, Clarence Clough Buel and Robert Underwood Johnson, proposed a series of articles on the War, to be written by some of the fratricidal conflict’s surviving participants, Northerners and Southerners alike. Beginning in 1884, this series, called “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” proved to be so popular that Century’s publishers decided to anthologize it, along with additional articles, memoirs, and reminiscences. Issued serially in 1887-1888, the massive four-volume set quickly became accepted as the comprehensive (and surprisingly unbiased) account of the War. The nearly 3000 pages of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War featured more than a thousand maps, engraved portraits, spot designs, and other original artwork created by some of America’s top illustrators. These included familiar names such as A. R. Waud and Winslow Homer, men who had been highly regarded as field correspondent sketch artists during the actual conflict. But Century also commissioned new illustrations from the outstanding military subject specialists of its own day, artists such as J. O. Davidson, H. A. Ogden, and Isaac Walton Taber.
This project contains a selection of over one hundred of the best examples from among these illustrations, including both battle scenes and camp life, along with details of weapons and uniforms.
The contents of this project are presented as a free-use educational resource. Because these illustrations are in the public domain, they may be freely copied and used for any desired application. Similarly, the cataloging information and descriptive notes provided for each image are not proprietary information, and may be freely copied, adapted, or re-used, either in part or in their entirety.
English Architecture
The James Collection of English Architecture (c.1100-1800 CE) was photographed by Sara Nair James, professor of Renaissance Art at Mary Baldwin College, Virginia. The archive includes cathedrals and parish churches from the Norman Romanesque period; ecclesiastical buildings in the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles; Medieval secular architecture including castles, marketplaces and town halls; Perpendicular Gothic collegiate buildings; Tudor, Elizabethan, Baroque and Neoclassical country houses and churches. This photographic survey was funded in part by the Yum and Ross Arnold Fund and the Jesse Ball DuPont Grant to the Master's of Arts in Literature Program at Mary Baldwin College.
Historic Illustrations of Art & Architecture
The historic illustrations included in this project were originally published during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many originally appeared in publications that predated the widespread use of photography for art documentation. These engravings, line drawings, and plans reflect both the technological and aesthetic standards of their time. By their very nature, they often represent subjective interpretations of the monuments and works depicted, and as such they offer fascinating insights into the cultural values of art and architectural history during the formative years of these disciplines.
While these illustrations are often beautiful examples of the draftsman’s or engraver’s skill, by their very nature they also represent subjective interpretations of the monuments and works depicted. Anyone wishing to use these images for teaching and research purposes should bear this in mind. Moreover, some of these illustrations may no longer reflect current scholarship due to ongoing research and critical reassessment of individual sites and works since their original publication. Therefore, the use of these images for pedagogical purposes should be complemented as necessary by comparison with updated plans, drawings, and photographs of the subject works and sites.
Historic Posters (1880 – 1918)
In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost. Skilled illustrators and graphic designers – such as Alphonse Mucha, Jules Cheret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec -- quickly began to exploit this new technology; the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880s through the First World War) was the spectacular result.
This collection of over one hundred and sixty digital images of historic posters from this period was originally compiled to support the teaching of Design History and Graphic Design courses at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Many of the artists who designed posters during this period were already well-known in other media, such as painting and architecture. Their creative success helped to bridge the gap between “high art” and popular visual culture, and to introduce even those who never visited museums or galleries to examples of innovative design. Today, these striking posters are highly regarded as being among the most distinctive examples of fin-de-siecle styles such as Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession.
All of these works are in the public domain under United States Copyright Law.