The Magoon Collection at Vassar College is a searchable database that makes available images and textual information relating to 3,790 works of art which were assembled in the 1850s and early 1860s by Rev. Elias Magoon of Albany (1810-1886), whose interests at the time centered on British architecture and antiquarianism. Ninety-seven percent of the images are works on paper. Through agents in London, Magoon purchased several estate sales of print publishers and artists, and carefully pasted the works in albums. In 1864 he sold the albums, along with his collection of American paintings, to Matthew Vassar for $20,000, who, in turn, used them to equip the art gallery of his new college.

Most of the works in the Magoon collection are by nineteenth-century British artists and are topographical in nature, comprising architectural and garden studies, plans, and elevations; landscapes; images of existing buildings of historical value; costume studies; and scenes of everyday life in London and the countryside. Many of the individual works of art are of high artistic quality and interesting in their own right, such as drawings by John Ruskin, Thomas Rowlandson, or J.M.W. Turner. Roughly twenty percent of the collection consists of what might be termed as 'ephemera', popular prints and clippings from magazines that cannot be considered of museum exhibition quality but which provide an interesting contextual buttress for understanding Magoon's motivation in organizing the materials the way he did.

Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the web site is designed as an on-going cataloguing project with the goal of making images and textual information more accessible to scholars, students, and the general public.

The textual material for each work on paper has been extracted from the collections management database of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. The electronic capacity of this project provides the opportunity to access a large number of images and information on-line. It also allows the user to respond to the information provided. While some of the prints and drawings in the database have been linked to specific artists, projects or publications, the relationship and attributions of others has yet to be determined. If you have any additional information on our works on paper, please let us know. As an interactive scholarly tool, we hope that the database of information and images will be strengthened by the critical commentary and exchange provided by scholars and students of various disciplines.