Wayback Machine

Blog reader Gene Snyder has shared a great link for old art texts online. He says:

I'm a big geek when it comes to art books. I can't get enough of them, especially old ones that were written while the artists or techniques that they are talking about were alive and in full swing. There's a site at www.archive.org that has a HUGE collection of books that go way back. Here's a small list of some books that I've collected from the site so far:

- "Treatise on Painting - Leonardo da Vinci", Translated by John Riguad, 1877.
- "The Painter in Oil", by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst, 1898. (Neat thing about this book is Parkhurst was student of William Bouguereau).
- "Our American Artists", by S.G.W. Benjamin, 1879. (Has some great biographies of artists).
- "Asher B. Durand - A Memorial Address", by Daniel Huntington, 1887.
- "Velasquez", by R.A.M. Stevenson, 1906. (Goes into pretty good detail about Velasquez's technique).
Thanks, Gene!

To which I'd add:
"Aims and Ideals of Art" by George Clausen.
"The life of an artist, an autobiography" - Breton, Jules, 1827-1906
"The Science of Painting" - Jehan-Georges Vibert
"The Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting." Kenyon Cox
"Cyclopedia of painters and paintings (Volume 1)" - Champlin, John Denison, 1834-1915
"Pictorial composition and the critical judgment of pictures" - Poore, Henry Rankin, 1859-1940

There's a complete annotated bibliography in the back of Imaginative Realism.
Visit Gene's website and blog.