Detailed information about available prints and drawings

History of the project
What is currently available?
Images on the database
Sponsors and donors

Many categories of works on paper have been completely catalogued and these are listed on the main page of what is currently available. Some parts are as yet only partly catalogued, and to save the user looking for something that is not yet here, we offer these notes.

All drawings and paintings have been catalogued, and all Eastern prints. The biggest problems relate to the vast collection of Western prints in the Department of Prints and Drawings. This is organised into a number of different series, and the cataloguing has systematically followed their arrangement.

The series of prints that have been catalogued:

• all the mounted and framed prints of any size
• all the post-1900 prints of all schools
• all the larger unmounted prints arranged under the name of the printmaker
• all the smaller unmounted prints of the German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, East European and American schools; of the French school and the Dutch and Flemish schools with the exception of the nineteenth century
• all the seventeenth-century prints of the British school, and all the British mezzotints earlier than about 1830
• the entire series of reproductive prints after British artists
• the satires (of all schools) until the year 1832, with the exception of a few satires in albums or books (the text of the British Museum catalogue of British satires is entered up to 1827, and the rest will be added by the end of 2009)
• the printed fans and games
• the broadsides
• the watchpapers
• the larger sized prints in the series of prints showing historical events (about half the total)
• the copper printing plates, wooden blocks and lithographic stones

The series of prints still awaiting cataloguing:

• the ordinary size unmounted prints by nineteenth-century French and Dutch and Flemish printmakers
• the ordinary size unmounted prints by British printmakers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• the reproductive prints after artists of all schools (with the exception of the British series): work is currently in progress on the Italian and the Dutch and Flemish series
• the ordinary size historical prints (work on these is currently in progress)
• the topographical prints (work is in progress on the views of London)
• the portrait prints
• the illustrated books and sets of prints in bindings
• the trade cards (work on these is currently in progress)
• the playing cards (work on these is currently in progress)
• the book-plates (or ex-libris)

Image scanning

Scanning of the drawing collection is complete. For the prints, it is following the cataloguing of the print collection, but is in arrears. Work continues and more images are being added each week.

At the moment images are available for all except the largest sizes of the mounted series and for most of the unmounted satires. Work is proceeding on the other unmounted prints, including most of the Dutch and Flemish and French series, while the British and German are in progress.