InfoGuides: Global Theater History: Find Images and Primary Sources

Find Digital Images and Primary Sources

Performance is a multidimensional art form encompassing costumes, artifacts, and spaces that often reflect cultural traditions, symbols, and regional contexts from where they originated. Some elements of performance cannot be fully captured in words alone, making visual research essential.

To gain a deeper understanding of these regional and cultural aspects, explore digital images and primary sources related to your area of interest. Visual materials can offer invaluable insights into various facets of theatrical traditions and practices across cultures.

For example:

Discover artistic works that visually depict the historical era, cultural context, or theatrical practices relevant to your area of interest.
Explore fashion illustrations, costume designs, artifacts, and other visual materials that can provide insights into the aesthetic choices in different regions and time periods.
Consult primary sources like playbills or posters, which can provide valuable information about their cultural significance.

Artistic Images and Primary Sources

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Contains over a million images documenting artistic traditions across many cultures and time periods. Updated frequently, please check back often for updated searches & collections. Note: ARTstor users must create a free account to save and share images. Users must turn off the popup blocker.
Daily Life through History This link opens in a new window
Supplies primary documents, reference works, monographs, images, maps, illustrations, and time lines depicting activities of daily life across the globe and throughout history. Covered time periods: Ancient (beginning of time to 4th century), Medieval (5th century to 14th century), Modern (15th century to 19th century), and Present (20th century to 21st century).
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
A digital preservation repository and access platform for long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Scholarly art encyclopedia. Includes over 200,000 reference articles on every aspect of the visual arts from prehistory to the present, with selected images, written by over 6,800 scholars. Serves as the access point for Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and other Oxford art reference resources.

Smithsonian Image Gallery
Includes over 530,000 electronic images from several archival repositories and museums at the Smithsonian.