Arts & Literature
Artworks and objects, dance, design, furniture, motion pictures, music, ornament, performance, theatre and more
500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection
Hundreds of images from the Cia Fornaroli Collection illustrate the rich history of Italian dance. The collection includes designs, lithographs, ephemera, and more.
Explore:
arts
Africana & Black History
Several thousand items ranging from historical documents and rare visual materials to contemporary photo-journalism, relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present; selected in the course of developing the NYPL website "African American Migration Experience."
Explore:
arts |
culture |
history
Books by Alvin Langdon Coburn
66 photogravure portraits of artists, writers, statesmen and other public figures, primarily American and English, in photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1913 Men of Mark (from 1904 to 1913) and his 1922 More Men of Mark (from 1913 to 1922).
Explore:
arts |
culture
Cabinet Card Portraits in the Collection of Radical Publisher Benjamin R. Tucker
260 portrait photographs, from about 1880-1900, chiefly albumen cabinet cards and cartes de visite, of radical figures, and a variety of statesmen, authors, artists, actresses and other notable, primarily European, cultural figures. The backs of these cards are also viewable.
Explore:
arts |
culture |
history
Dust Jackets from American and European Books, 1926-1947
More than 2,000 original specimens of book jackets from trade books acquired routinely by the Research Libraries.
Explore:
arts |
printing
Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan
More than 1,000 images encompassing 1,200 years of Japanese book art, including Buddhist sutras, painted manuscripts, portraits, landscapes, calligraphic verse, and photographic books, with related drawings and woodblock prints.
Explore:
arts |
culture
Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts
Over 100 illuminations selected from the 1,156 extant pages of the Padua Ashkenazi Mahzor, a medieval Jewish festival prayer book; Hamburg Haggadah (1731); Ketubbot (1638); and Xanten Bible.
Explore:
arts |
culture |
printing
Joseph Muller Collection of Music and Other Portraits
Thousands of images dating from the 16th to the early 20th-centuries, mostly engravings and lithographs, with some drawings, predominantly of composers and musicians but also including portraits of actors, heads of state, music patrons, nobility, philosophers, poets, printers, theorists, and writers, among others, amassed by Joseph Muller, a private collector.
Explore:
arts
The Picture Collection of The New York Public Library
Over 30,000 images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, created mostly before 1923 and selected from the over 1,000,000 images in the Mid-Manhattan Library's Picture Collection.
Explore:
arts |
cities |
culture |
history
Picturing America, 1497-1899: Prints, Maps, and Drawings bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United States
Over 1,000 original prints, drawings, and maps, featuring views of American towns and cities, representations of historical events, scenes, places, and battles.
Explore:
arts |
cities |
culture |
history
"Queen of Off-Broadway:" Lucille Lortel Collection Photographs 1902-1998
An appreciative selected collection of eighteen memorabilia photographs from the papers of Lucille Lortel (1900-1999), the woman regarded as the founder of Off-Broadway, the second wave of little theatre in America.
Explore:
arts
Samuel Putnam Avery Print Collection and Related Works
Nearly 3,000 etchings, lithographs, and some drawings, by prominent 19th-century printmakers such as of Félix Bracquemond, Félix Buhot, Francisco Goya, Charles Jacque, Edouard Manet, Charles Méryon, and Camille Pissarro.
Explore:
arts |
printing
Turn of the Century Posters
Over 1,000 American and European posters printed from 1893 through the first years of the 20th-century. The collection represents the inception and heyday of magazine, book, and newspaper posters of the last decade of the 19th-century, and well into the 20th-century.
Explore:
arts |
printing
Vintage Holiday Postcards
More than 1,800 vintage holiday postcards from the New York Public Library's Picture Collection themed around national celebrations of the United States: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Washington's Birthday, among others.
Explore:
arts |
culture |
printing
Walt Whitman Manuscripts
Over 1,000 items, including manuscripts, printed works, and portraits of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the leading American poet of the 19th century.
Explore:
arts
William Blake: Illustrated Books
Three original books in "relief etching" by William Blake, who composed the texts, designed the texts and decorations, and printed the pages: America: A Prophecy(1793 [1794?]), Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and Milton(1804 [i.e. 1808?]).
Explore:
arts |
printing
Wonders: Images of the Ancient World
Over 1,700 images of the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and other ancient Mediterranean cultures as conceived and depicted by artists and travelers from the 18th to the early 20th century, as represented in book and periodical illustrations, engravings, lithographs and photographs. A wide range of subjects includes arms and armor, architecture, furniture, pottery, mythology, religion, theater and the Seven Wonders of the World.
Explore:
arts |
cities |
culture |
history
Yiddish Theatre Placards: Buenos Aires and New York
Placards from the two leading centers of Yiddish theater in their respective heydays: New York, 1890s-1910s, and Buenos Aires, 1930s-1940s
Explore:
arts |
culture
NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the vast collections of The New York Public Library, including drawings, illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
