Finding Images Online and In Print 

An artist's catalogue raisonne is a definitive listing of works. In theory, the catalogue raisonne is an exhuastive inventory, but as we all know, new works discovered from time-to-time. Others are found to be fake, or relegated to the status "school of, " "Style of, " etc. Still, the catalogue raisonne is a good first start, unless good quality, large color images are needed. The catalogue raisonne is essentially a documentary tool, in which the text (bibliography, provenance, etc.) is really more important than image quality.

Since the nineteenth century, just about any book on art has included reproductions of the works of art being studied or discussed. Early works included engraved reproductions of paintings, sculpture or other art media. Today, we are accustomed to finding very good quality photographic reproductions of works of art in monographs, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogs.

If you are searching for works by a particular artist, and you know his/her name, remember to do both AUTHOR and SUBJECT searches in BobCat. If the artist's name is fairly distinctive, try a simple "query words" search; this will work for Robert Rauschenberg, but good luck sorting through the hundreds of David Smiths!

For major artists, like Raphael, for example, you can assume that we will have a "Complete Works" Volume. In BobCat , if you do a keyword search for the terms Raphael and complete, from the basic search screen, you'll get the following results:

To find a more comprehensive list of completed works by the artist, remember to look for foreign language variations on the word complete --particularly Italian (completa) --some of the most beautiful printed art books in the world are published in Italy!