18th century blog

I found this new database via Isis’ Wardrobe and Madame Berg.

Livrustkammaren (The royal armory), The Hallwyl museum and Skokloster castle have put their large collections online, containing many18th century costumes and other objects. The search function is great but the photo quality isn’t always the best. Click the picture to go to the website.

P.S. I just added a Databases category where I will be adding all the posts about 18th century related databases.

This is probably old news to most of you, but LACMA has a new image library where you can see high resolution images of many of their objects, including many 18th century clothes.

John Singleton Copley - The complete works is a website where you yourself can upload missing paintings and drawings to complete the collection. I think it’s a great idea.

A couple of days ago I visited the new exhibition at Nordiska museet, Modemakt or Power of fashion. There wasn’t a huge amount of 18th century clothes but the ones they did show were really wonderful.

The exhibition has it’s own website complete with a database containing pictures and information about most of the garments on show. Continue reading to see my own photos from the exhibition.

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Pockets of History is a great site with pictures of and information about tie-on pockets, many of them from the 1700s.

Thanks to Abbyelyn on the Historical Sewing forum I just found out that Colonial Williamsburg are putting their collection online! There are lots of clothes but also portraits, prints, furniture and so on. Everything is accompanied by a very informative text about the item. Unfortunately the pictures are rather small, and I can’t find a way of browsing everything in categories (except the “highlights” selection) rather than having to search (I can’t be sure I haven’t missed something!).

Click the picture to go the collection!

EDIT: I found a way to browse categories. In “Advanced search” choose “classification is” and you’ll be able to choose a category.

John Guilford Russell, 1790

Check out the Louvre databases! Not exactly tons of 18th century stuff and not very big pictures, but still a lot of great stuff.

I was just contacted by this new site, Creative Spaces, which is like a museum community, and it looks like it could be really fun. You can search the collections of nine British museums and add things to your favourites, start groups and so on. I have started exploring it but haven’t tried all the features yet. The site isn’t completely finished yet and it doesn’t work perfectly, but I think it’s very promising!

You can see my profile here, and of course I started an 18th century fashion group.

Portrait of Mrs James Denham by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1789.

Here’s a great resource for 18th century portraits. Historical Portraits is a database of British historical portraiture and there are some wonderful 18th century examples among them. There’s not a huge amount but the photos are generally great and there was a surprisingly large amount of portraits I hadn’t even seen before!

Yet another great museum database, IMATEX is the database of the Textile Museum and Documentation Centre in Terrassa. Lots of amazing 18th century clothes, especially jackets.

Jean-Laurent Mosnier, Portrait of a lady, 1791.

Here’s another online art database you can search by time period, the Web Gallery of Art. The easiest way to find the 18th century art is to go to the list of artists and choose period or time-line.

On the website of the Finnish national gallery you can search artworks by time period (just click “artworks”), and there are lots of 18th century ones.

I came across the Spanish museum Museo del traje’s website and figured out how to search their collection. They have lots of beautiful 18th century clothes. Click the picture above to go directly to the search engine.

If you know Spanish you won’t need any help, but if not, I wrote “indumentaria historica” (a term I found elsewhere on the site and seemed to mean something like historical clothing) in the “Búsqueda General” search field and 1700-1799 in “Datación”. You can’t write directly in the “Datación” field, you click the “Fechas/Periodos” button and write the first and last date you want in the two “Año” fields and then press “Aceptar”. Finally press the “Buscar” button.

That seemed to get all the 18th century clothes, but if you know Spanish and a better way to search let me know in the comments.

Here’s another great database to check out. Joconde is a catalogue of French museum collections. Go to the advanced search and write 18e siècle in the “Période/Datation” box and you’ll get all the 18th century stuff. I found lots of great paintings, objects and clothes.