Art History and Visual Arts

The Art Reading is temporarily closed due to renovations on the upper floors of Regenstein Library. The East Asian Art Collection is pageable. The collection is eligible for Scan & Deliver. Patrons may also request a circulating copy via Interlibrary Loan.

The Archive is named after Max Epstein (1875-1954), a business executive and philanthropist who in 1937 founded the collection by donating a large number of photographs acquired from Art Library of Sir Robert Witt, a photographic archive now at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. The Archive has since increased its holdings through purchases and additional gifts.

Over the years, several thousand original prints were transferred from the Archive to the Smart Gallery (now Smart Museum). A small selection of images from the Epstein Archive are digitized and may be viewed in the Art History Department Image Collection.

Read about  the collection in more detail, it's organization and using the photographs.

The photographs are available by request in the Special Collections Research Center. Please contact nspiegel@uchicago.edu to make arrangements.

The following collections are available by request in the Special Collections Research Center. Contact nspiegel@uchicago.edu to make arrangements.

• Bartsch Illustrations:  A collection of 17,000 4 x 6" photographs of Old Master prints in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum. The pictures complement the commentary in the Illustrated Bartsch, a standard reference work (f NE90.B33 stacks). The complete collection of over 50,000 images is now available in ARTstor.
   
• Papal medals. A photographic survey of medals from the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century, based on the collection in the British Museum. Approximately 3,000 4 x 6" photographs.
   
• The Decimal Index to the Art of the Low Countries (D.I.A.L.). More than 14,000 postcard size photographs, constituting an iconographic survey covering the 14th to 18th centuries.