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Pays-Bas, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie

Notice révisée le 09/08/2013
rijksbureau-voor-kunsthistorische-documentatie

The RKD is an indispensable stop for anyone interested in art in Europe. In addition to numerous announcements and links to other resources and institutions, its website offers access, via a series of databases, to the vast holdings the RKD has accumulated since its foundation in 1932.


- Artistes&. This immense database comprises biographical entries for roughly 200,000 artists, collectors, art dealers, and art historians, searchable using a variety of terms and categories: name, part of a name, monogram, nationality, place of birth or death, place or period of activity, specific characteristics (anatomical draftsman, antiquarian, airbrush artist…), or a combination of the terms. For example, a request for French artists active between 1875 and 1899 who also visited the Netherlands delivers 23 results. Internal links within each entry connect directly to related elements in the RKD’s image database and in the library catalogue.
- Images. Of the 6 million images in the RKD’s collection, a small percentage, some 170,000 images of works of art, can be viewed through this image bank. The sophisticated search function includes searches by artist name, subject, word(s) in the title, geographic term, object, technique, material, signature, period of production, name of collection or location of collection. Here, too, search terms can be combined for extremely precise results: paintings from 1653 depicting one or more trees: 23 (!) results.


- Portraits. The search engine gives access to a database of (mostly Dutch) portraits, searchable by general term, first and/or last name, artist name, year of production, age of the person depicted, or collection to which the portrait belongs. Alternative spellings are taken into account.


- Studio. This database is the result of the project “Mythes van het atelier,” concluded in 2010, whose objective was to give insight into the workshop and artistic practices of Dutch artists from the nineteenth century. It embraces a large number of quotes from artists and others, drawn from more than 7,000 letters located in artists’ archives and in collections of manuscripts (from the RKD, the Rijksmuseum, and the municipal archives in The Hague), as well as excerpts from contemporary journals and newspapers.


- Library. Approximately 200,000 of the 450,000 titles in the RKD library have thus far been entered into the catalogue. The collection of sale catalogues in particular, 150,000 strong, is among the largest in the world. Although it appears fairly standard at first glance, the search function features useful additions, including fields by type of object (series, exhibition catalogue, sale catalogue, collection catalogue).


Collections and archives. For the moment, this database consists of 610 descriptions of archives and sub-collections within the RKD’s holdings.

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