Where to start?
This guide will help you select resources for topics in art and visual culture. Use the main menu to find resources on specific topics. If you are beginning research on an unfamiliar topic, first consultreference sources – dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, etc. – for introductory information about an artist, artwork, art form, movement, or time period.
Overviews and bibliographies can be found in Oxford Art Online and the Met Museum's Timeline of Art History.
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Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Oxford Art Online enables access and cross-search functionality to Grove and Oxford reference content in one location. Provides access to Grove Art Online, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Includes image partnerships with ARTstor, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Images for College Teaching, Art Resource, Artists Rights Society and numerous international art galleries and artists.
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Oxford Reference This link opens in a new window
Oxford Reference Online contains 100+ dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University press.
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Grove Art Online This link opens in a new windowA scholarly art encyclopedia, covering both Western and non-Western art. See Oxford Art Online.
Biography Resources
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Biography and Genealogy Master Index (A Gale directory) This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive index to 10 million+ biographical sketches in over 1000 current and retrospective biographical dictionaries. Covers both contemporary and historical figures throughout the world.
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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window
Contains the complete text of the thirty-three printed volumes as well as all its supplements. Over 55,000 lives are detailed, and over 10,000 portraits are included. Special themes may also be traced through the DNB, such as lists of office holders or members of particular groups. Feature essays appear throughout.
Journal Article Databases
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Art & Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
This art research database covers a broad range of subjects from fine, decorative and commercial art, to various areas of architecture and architectural design. It features full-text articles, indexing and abstracts for an array of journals, books and more. It also has a collection of over 63,000 images provided by Picture Desk and other sources
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Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides full text for hundreds of journals, books and other published sources from around the world. This resource is for students, researchers, and educators interested in all aspects of the humanities, with worldwide content pertaining to literary, scholarly, and creative thought. This subscription is supported by an NEH Challenge Grant: "Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this database do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities."
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JSTOR Journals and Books This link opens in a new window
The journals archive consists of older (at least 2-5 years) issues of core scholarly journals across a wide range of subjects including the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The eBook collections are DRM-free and allow for unlimited concurrent use and unlimited chapter downloads and printing.
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Project Muse This link opens in a new windowFull-text scholarly articles in literature and criticism, history, visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, social science, mathematics.
Recent Books
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The Intimate Portrait
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Call Number: SJSU Library 7th Floor ND1314.4 .L56 2008ISBN: 9781906270148Publication Date: 2009-05-16This scholarly publication accompanies the first major exhibition held in Britain to focus on the more intimate types of Georgian and Regency portraiture. -
Citizen Portrait
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Call Number: SJSU Library 7th Floor ND1314.2 .C66 2012ISBN: 0300162790Publication Date: 2012-11-27For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility--not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. -
The Painted Face
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Call Number: SJSU Library 7th Floor ND1329.3.W6 G37 2007ISBN: 0300111185Publication Date: 2007-09-26The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century. The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres's idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse's elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting's capacity to describe and embellish "nature," to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso's Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift.
