In April 1943, at the height of World War II, Adolf Hitler issued the Führer’s Order for Monumental Painting. Called the Führerprojekt, it directed the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to implement and administer a photographic survey of immovable wall and ceiling paintings. The resulting images would serve as archetypes for reconstructing artworks damaged during the war. Ministry officials began by compiling lists of historic buildings as well as by hiring and training photographers and then equipping them with cameras, lenses, film, and lighting devices and arranging for scaffolding construction and ground transportation. The Ministry anticipated the program would produce thousands of images. For efficiency in processing, photographers were provided with Agfacolor Neu, a pioneering color slide film developed by the German company Agfa in 1936.

Two years later, by April 1945, survey photographers had documented the immovable paintings and wall treatments in 480 buildings dating from the 10th to the 20th century in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Russia, among other countries. The campaign continued unabated until the defeat of the Third Reich in May. By that time, 60 percent of the photographed sites had been bombed.

The National Gallery of Art received the 3,572 color films in the Führerprojekt in 1951 through the efforts of publisher Kurt Wolff, founder of Pantheon Books. Wolff had traversed Germany and Austria during a trip in the early summer of 1948 specifically to gather the Führerprojekt color films and their identifying lists for the Library of Congress. During this trip he also acquired 1,038 color films that document stained-glass windows in Germany and Austria that were in danger of destruction and were removed during the war. All of these films were later gifted to the National Gallery of Art and are now part of the Kurt Wolff Archive.

The archive stands out as an invaluable resource for images of historic wall and ceiling paintings in Europe. Its contents are especially significant considering the poor documentation of some sites due to war conditions and the loss of many color films as a result of the bombing and chaos at the end of World War II.

Digital scans of all 3,572 color films in the Führerprojekt, in addition to their catalog records, are available online. 

At the beginning of World War II, stained-glass windows were removed from churches across Germany and Austria for safe storage. The German Union for Art Scholarship and the Emergency Association of German Science saw this as an opportunity to photograph the windows under controlled conditions. A privately funded survey of the stained glass, led by Professor Hans Wentzel in partnership with art historian Elisabeth Schuerer von Witzleben, lasted from 1940 to 1948. Schuerer continued to supervise the project after the war at her own expense and under her own initiative until it was complete. Publisher Kurt Wolff collected these 1,038 color films, in addition to the Führerprojekt color films, during his 1948 trip to Germany and Austria.

Digital scans of these 1,038 color films and their catalog records are available online. 

The National Gallery of Art photographic archives and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection cosponsored Professor Otto Demus’s campaign from 1975 to 1979 to photograph the mosaic art in Venice’s Basilica of Saint Mark. Ekkehard Ritter was the photographer, and the project culminated in Demus’s seminal book, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (1984). Dumbarton Oaks is the repository for the color photography; the black-and-white negatives are held by the Gallery’s department of image collections. Nearly 1,200 digital scans are available online.

The Kress Collection of Historic Images at the National Gallery of Art—more than 18,300 scans of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and decorative arts purchased or once considered for purchase by Samuel H. Kress and the foundation he established in 1929—has been digitized, making these significant holdings more accessible to researchers around the world through the Gallery’s department of image collections. Kress donated most of these objects to 90 museums, colleges, and other institutions in 33 states, with the greater number of these gifts coming to the National Gallery of Art.

The digital files were made from two sources. The first is a group of negatives, photographs, and lantern slides, largely gifts from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, that range in date from around 1910 to 1969; the second, a group of negatives made of the National Gallery of Art Kress objects by staff in the department of imaging and digital services from around 1942 to around 2007.

Both groups of images document works of art in various states of conservation, as well as some x-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet images. In a few cases, the files include scans of comments by scholars written on the backs of the photographs. Photographs of Samuel Kress’s apartment in New York (above) show 282 magnificent objects—including the Madonna and Child by Domenico Veneziano and Masolino’s Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate—as they were arranged before their dispersal.

Art historians, conservators, and students have used these images to enhance their understanding of these objects. The photographs can illuminate aspects of the works of art that we can no longer see. For instance, conservators routinely study these images in order to anticipate remnants of earlier damage or restorations. Art historians may compare high resolution details to other known works by an artist to assist in attribution questions. Students may better understand the “life” of a work of art by seeing changes over time, illustrated through a variety of reproductive processes.

The Kress Collection of Historic Images project was made possible by two generous grants by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Learn more about the project.

The Foto Reali Archive is a resource prized by scholars, and as such it is routinely consulted by art historians, conservators, curators, and other researchers. Foto Reali was a Florentine photographic firm that surveyed private art collections as well as dealer inventories in Italy in the early twentieth century, often photographing the paintings in situ. Among the private collections represented in the archive are such key collections as those assembled by Harold Acton, Vittorio Cini, Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, Luigi Grassi, and Eugenio Ventura. More about Foto Reali Archive.

The Clarence Ward Archive focuses on French medieval and American architecture and consists of more than four thousand large-format nitrate negatives, from which three thousand black-and-white photographs and four thousand digital images have been produced. These negatives were the product of photographic campaigns undertaken by Clarence Ward (1884–1973) during the 1920s and 1930s, with the assistance of Arthur Princehorn (1904–2001), staff photographer at Oberlin College. Ward was a distinguished professor of art history at Oberlin College, as well as the founder of the college's art library and the first director of the campus museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since Ward conducted his French photographic campaigns during the early part of the 20th century, the resulting photographs provide vital documentation of many structures that were subsequently damaged during World War II.

The Foto Reali and Clarence Ward digitization projects were a collaboration between the National Gallery of Art and ARTstor (a nonprofit initiative founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to make these important scholarly resources more broadly available for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes through the use of digital technologies.

Individual object records for these collections can be found in the library's online catalog.