Digital Art History and Digital Humanities

As a pioneer in digital publishing, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is committed to working with authors to produce digital art history projects. NCAW’s editors actively encourage submissions. For more information, see the submission guidelines for these articles.

American Art History Digitally

sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art

Volume 22, Issue 2 | Autumn 2023

From Zuni to Dupont Circle: Isabel and Larz Anderson’s Native American Collection

by Stephen T. Moskey and Isabel L. Taube

This digital art history project analyzes the display of Native American pottery and weavings from the US Southwest in the Washington, DC, home of a wealthy, well-connected, worldly, and intellectually curious couple, Isabel and Larz Anderson, in the first decade of the twentieth century. It contends that these objects were presented by the Andersons in eclectic arrangements designed to authenticate their cosmopolitanism and to facilitate their advancement in white, elite social and political circles. The article, which analyzes how the Andersons refigured the pots and blankets in their home, is expanded and more fully illustrated in an interactive digital tour of Anderson House that reveals the broader domestic and social context in which the Native objects appeared.

Volume 21, Issue 1 | Spring 2022

West on the Walls: The 1807 Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

by Wendy Bellion, Lea C. Stephenson, and James Kelleher, with Allan McLeod and Kristen Nassif

This article examines the history and significance of the first exhibition of paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1807. It follows the transatlantic networks that brought Robert Fulton’s art collection to Philadelphia, reconstructs Charles Willson Peale’s installation, and assesses Benjamin West’s role in these endeavors. Accompanied by an interactive digital study of the exhibition and gallery, it argues that Peale designed the installation with several interests in mind, including the Pennsylvania Academy’s ambitions, Fulton’s promotion of the illustrated poem The Columbiad, and Peale’s hopes to secure a permanent home for his Philadelphia Museum.

Volume 20, Issue 3 | Autumn 2021

Impossible Garden: A Contemporary Artist’s Digital Engagement with Women Artist-Naturalists of the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond

by Emma Steinkraus, with Carey Gibbons and Allan McLeod

In this digital version of her research-based, multimedia art installation Impossible Garden, specially prepared for NCAW, artist Emma Steinkraus examines the contributions of women artist-naturalists to historical botanical and scientific art primarily produced during the long nineteenth century. A fully navigable, annotated digital garden created from reproductions of illustrations of flora, fauna, and fungi made by sixty-nine women artists across four continents is accompanied by an interview with the artist by Carey Gibbons. By situating the project within the realms of biography, feminist discourse, social history, colonialism, and environmentalism, Steinkraus encourages a rethinking of works by women artist-naturalists while exploring the nineteenth century as a source of inspiration for artists and scholars today.

Volume 20, Issue 2 | Summer 2021

The Ambient Interior in the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century

Isabel L. Taube, Editor

Isabel L. Taube, Editor, “Editor’s Introduction”; Julia B. Rosenbaum, “Outside In: Space, Light, and the Artful Interior at Frederic Church’s Olana”; Lea C. Stephenson, “Kingscote’s Dining Room and the Multisensorial Interior in the Late Nineteenth Century”; Anne Helmreich, Edward Sterrett, and Sandra van Ginhoven, “Purpose Built: Duveen and the Commercial Art Gallery.”

Volume 18, Issue 2 | Autumn 2019

Káma-Kapúska! Making Marks in Indian Country, 1833–34

by Kristine K. Ronan, with Allan McLeod

Over the winter of 1833–34, the Numak'aki (Mandan) war chief Mató-Tópe (ca. 1784–1837) visited the painting studio kept by Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (1809–93) at Fort Clark, a trading post in what is now North Dakota, fifty-five times. This project argues that this shared studio space and its activities are an extension of the Middle Ground, or the cultural arena co-created by Native and non-Native peoples on the French frontier. The Numak'aki name that local warriors bestowed upon Bodmer (Kapúska, or “Forcefully Makes Marks”) demonstrates this co-creation by describing the artist’s practices through a Numak'aki lens, rather than a Western one—a testimony to the co-operation of two distinct cultural systems within the Fort Clark studio. The project’s digital platform then models this argument in presenting the project’s related archives through both Native and non-Native frameworks.

Volume 18, Issue 1 | Spring 2019

Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School

by Kimberly Orcutt, with Allan McLeod

At its height, the American Art-Union (1838–52) boasted nearly 19,000 members from almost every state; it distributed engravings to all members and nearly 3,000 original works of art. While the Art-Union’s impact has been acknowledged, the exact nature of its influence has been difficult to discern. This article analyzes extensive data through interactive maps, timelines, and charts that show not only the institution’s broad reach, but also its unexpected role in fostering the landscape school that shaped US art throughout the nineteenth century.

Volume 17, Issue 2 | Autumn 2018

A Digital Recreation of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery: A Contribution to the Early History of Public Art Museums in the United States

by Sally Webster and David Schwittek, with Carlo Diego, Cara Jordan, Lauren Ritz, Leonidas Maliokas, and Bruce Weber

The genesis of this digital reconstruction of the Lenox Library Picture Gallery is nine archival photographs (ca. 1882) that replicate the installation of the paintings owned by the New York bibliophile and art collector James Lenox. This three-dimensional, interactive platform allows easy access to the paintings and their history. The primary goal is to demonstrate that Lenox’s picture gallery is representative of the pre-Gilded Age era, when issues such as collecting and installation practices in the United States were coming to the fore and curatorial strategies were becoming articulated.

Volume 17, Issue 1 | Spring 2018

Colleague Collectors: A Statistical Analysis of Artists’ Collecting Networks in Nineteenth-Century New York

by Diana Seave Greenwald, with Allan McLeod

This article on the history of collecting in the United States during the nineteenth century is divided in two parts. Part I uses novel quantitative data and econometric methods to examine the extent to which socioeconomic factors systematically influenced nineteenth-century American art collectors’ acquisitions. These statistical tests reveal that American artists were some of the most active collectors of contemporary American art during the nineteenth century. Part II explores the phenomenon of colleague collecting. It argues that nineteenth-century American artists collected one another’s work to help each other in an art world and market with inconsistent institutional and commercial support.

Summer 2016 Special Issue

sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Yale Center for British Art

Volume 15, Issue 2 | Summer 2016

The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: A Transatlantic Object

Guest edited by Martina Droth and Michael Hatt

This special issue on Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave offers a sustained examination of one of the most famous sculptures of the nineteenth century. This introduction explains the twin themes of the “transatlantic” and the “object,” which underpin this project’s approach. Moving the statue out of an insistently American frame, the sixteen articles presented here consider The Greek Slave as a set of objects that crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic. Displayed in many contexts and locations, the statue became both an icon of the shared Anglo-American culture of the nineteenth century and a symbol of the cultural and political divisions generated by America’s slave trade. This special issue examines The Greek Slave not as a single object for which any reproduction acts as a surrogate, but as a series of distinctive objects, including the six full-size statues and the varied reproductions that take the form and name of The Greek Slave.

Digital Humanities and Art History

sponsored by The A.W. Mellon Foundation

The first phase of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide’s Digital Humanities and Art History (DHAH) initiative ended with the last Mellon-funded article published in fall 2015.

Volume 15, Issue 1 | Spring 2016

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide’s “Digital Humanities and Art History”: Reflections on Our First Articles

by Emily Pugh, with Elizabeth Buhe and Petra Chu

From 2012 to 2015, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide published six articles in its “Digital Humanities and Art History” series, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. In this article, Petra Chu, Emily Pugh, and Elizabeth Buhe review the series and share their experiences working on these articles. They discuss the goals of NCAW’s DHAH initiative, present lessons learned, and share their insights into the influence of digital humanities methods and techniques in the field of art history.

Volume 14, Issue 3 | Autumn 2015

Tracing Transformations: Hilton Head Island’s Journey to Freedom, 1860–1865

by Dana E. Byrd, with Tyler DeAngelis

The digital tool Tracing Transformations in a Digital Age uses mapping and time-aware tools to visually reconstitute the spatial history of Civil War– and Reconstruction-era Hilton Head, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. In our own time, Hilton Head Island is known as a vacation paradise with pristine white-sand beaches and manicured golf courses. The history of the spatial transformation of the island and its direct connection with the local transition from slavery to freedom is important yet infrequently told, let alone shared in an open-source format. Changes in the island’s use, coupled with the natural ravages of time (including a severe hurricane in 1893), have effaced many of the material traces of Hilton Head’s past, leading researchers to rely more heavily on other evidence of the area’s history. Tracing Transformations mines extant archival sources and uses that information to reconstruct the region’s visual transformation between the years 1860 and 1865.

Volume 14, Issue 1 | Spring 2015

Imagining a Nation’s Capital: Rome and the John Henry Parker Photography Collection, 1864–1879

by Lindsay Harris and Luke Hollis, with Emily Pugh, Lavinia Ciuffa, and Maria Sole Fabri

This study focuses on a collection of photographs taken between 1864 and 1879 under the direction of John Henry Parker, a British editor and dilettante archaeologist, to provide a multi-perspective panorama of Rome around the time the city became capital of Italy in 1870. Emblematic of the nineteenth-century impulse to collect, document, and catalogue information about contemporary society as well as the past, the Parker Collection has long been praised as a “valuable” illustration of the early history of Rome. Yet the value of this imagery as an illustration of Rome’s modernity—the construction, demolition, beliefs, and ideals that accompanied the city’s emergence as the Italian capital—has yet to be discovered. This interactive research platform and essay use digital technology to investigate the Parker Collection as a set of data about late nineteenth-century Italy, revealing not only the interests and ideologies that shaped Rome into a modern, capital city, but also how digital media can spark new approaches to art history.

Volume 13, Issue 2 | Autumn 2014

Mapping the "White, Marmorean Flock": Anne Whitney Abroad, 1867–1868

by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, with Jenifer Bartle and David McClure, assisted by Kalyani Bhatt

This article and the associated maps and timeline use Anne Whitney’s letters as the framework for an examination of the art and life of an American artist abroad. It illustrates Whitney’s first sixteen months of travel through these and other contemporary sources to visualize her movement and activities through space and time. This project seeks to revise the impression of Henry James’s “white, marmorean flock” as a collective and look at Whitney as an individual with unique reactions to Italy, informed not only by the celebrated works of art and architecture around her but also by the experience of life abroad in all of its complexity.

Volume 13, Issue 1 | Spring 2014

Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X

by Elizabeth Buhe, with David Eisenberg, Nicholas Fischer, and Daniel Suo

This article proposes that the linguist Jean-François Champollion posited a new theory of Egyptian art in the mid-1820s and takes his theory as a means for interpreting France's first museum of Egyptian antiquities, the Musée Charles X, of which he was curator. This interpretation is made possible through the unprecedented use of digital tools to visualize a historic museum display. In addition to a scholarly essay and downloadable primary source material, this article invites readers to explore a fully-navigable, three-dimensional model of the Musée Charles X.

Volume 12, Issue 1 | Spring 2013

“In the Park”: Lewis Miller's Chronicle of American Landscape at Mid-Century

by Therese O’Malley and Kathryn R. Barush, with Emily Pugh, Jessica Ruse, and Courtney Tompkins

This study of Lewis Miller’s “Guide to Central Park” has taken several approaches in order to create a context for the album as well as to better understand the reception of Central Park in its opening years. In addition to two scholarly essays, this digital publication makes it possible to include a facsimile of the whole album accompanied by transcriptions and descriptions and links to notes, sources, and other relevant material.

Volume 11, Issue 3 | Autumn 2012

Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London's Art Market

by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, with David N. Israel and Seth Erickson

This article analyzes the local and global networks of the commercial art trade that dialectically informed the conditions of the art market in London over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. This analysis is achieved through a ground-breaking application of digital humanities tools: spatial mapping and network visualization. The article intends to advance both revisionary studies of the rise of the art dealer in nineteenth-century Europe and the application of modes of inquiry associated with the digital humanities to art history.