Stuart P. Embury, M.D., Library of American Art

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The Stuart P. Embury Library of American Art is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections on American art in the world. The Embury Library numbers more than 101,000 items and is searchable through the UNL Libraries catalog. It contains primary material and books covering all major and many minor figures in American Art, including painters, sculptors and printmakers. There are thousands of exhibition catalogues including nearly complete runs from the National Academy of Design and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The Library is unique in providing both rare primary materials, such as exhibition catalogs, and the secondary scholarship on American art that allows for expanded research. This site offers free online access to its collection of exhibition catalogs in the public domain, many of them not available elsewhere online, and many with marginalia. In addition to supporting traditional art historical research into individual artists and artworks, taste, consumption, patronage and collecting practices, this database makes it possible to analyze the art market in terms beyond the singular masterpiece. Most histories of nineteenth-century art have excluded the hundred thousand or more (literally) artists who, in just that century, produced, exhibited and sold art. To recover the patterns for art that, arguably, dominated the visual culture of the nineteenth century more than the styles of the avant-garde or any one artist, exhibition catalogues, auction records, and similar compilations offer valuable compilations of data in the form of artists’ names, titles, genres and sometimes owners. This information can identify trends in gender (where women versus men exhibited, what subjects each sex specialized in, rising or shrinking participation in the market), the popularity of different genres, and distribution of artworks geographically and socially (the rise of dealers).