LibGuides: Theatre Research Resources: Historical Images

Introduction

You may need to search for historical images in the course of your research. Whether you're looking for historical images of costumes, pictures of actors, or images to help you research set and production design, we have collected several recommendations below and divided them by context.

For a more exhaustive list of resources than we've collected on this page, check out the Main Library's guide on Finding Images and Video.

If you're hoping to find video material, check out our page on streaming media in the performing arts.

Finding Historical Images

The databases and digital hubs linked below allow you to search the digital collections of many cultural institutions, libraries, and museums at once!

Artstor This link opens in a new window
Searchable database of digital images and associated catalog data, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Europeana
Europeana provides access to over six million digital items, including images, texts, sounds, and videos. It is funded by the European Commission and its member states, and includes content from museum, galleries, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections. The extensive list of organizations that Europeana pulls its content from includes notable institutions such as the Rijksmuseum, the British Library, and the Louvre.
Digital Public Library of America
Highlights of collections from libraries, archives and museums across the United States, organized into easy-to-navigate topics.

Portraits of Actors from the University of Illinois
Portraits of Actors, 1720-1920, includes almost 3,500 pictures of actors — studio portraits and actors posing in costume for a particular role or performing a scene from a play. Dramatists, theatrical managers, singers and musicians are also included, but the majority are British and American actors who worked between about 1770 and 1893. Among the hundreds of actors included are: Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, John Philip Kemble, Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, William Henry West Betty, Charles Mathews, Dorothy Jordan, Frances Abington, and Ada Rehan. The images were digitized from etchings, engravings, lithographs, mezzotints, aquatints, wood engravings, photographs, and photomechanically-reproduced prints, all from the University of Illinois Theatrical Print Collection.
19th Century Actors and Theater Database
The 19th Century Actors and Theater Photographs database consists of over 600 photographs including cartes-de-visite and cabinet card studio portraits of entertainers, actors, and actresses who performed on the American stage in the mid- to late 1800s.

For a more exhaustive list of image resources for costume history and design, check out the Costume Images & Digital Collections page from our Costume Design LibGuide.

Costume Collections at London's V&A Museum
The V&A Museum's Theatre and Performance collections include over 3,500 stage costumes and accessories dating from the mid-18th century to today, a selection of which are photographed and available to be viewed online.

Digital Collections

We have highlighted a few libraries and museums below that have particularly rich digitized collections of theatre photographs and material freely available online. For a more complete list, of sources to check out the list of Digital Collections in the Performing Arts compiled by Eric Colleary, theatre historian and curator at the Harry Ransom Center.

Digital Theatre Collections from the NYPL
Various digital image collections covering many aspects of theatre, from photographs, to scrapbooks, to clippings files, posters, video, and more.
Performing Arts in the Library of Congress Digital Collections
Among the digital Performing Arts collections linked from this site are The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939; and The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920.
Digital Collections from the Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of the City of New York has a variety of digital collections focusing on theatre including: Broadway Productions, the Sophie Tucker Collection, and Yiddish Theatre.