In May 1903 the first three issues of The Burlington Magazine were collected in a volume of over four hundred pages that also contained the Magazine’s first subject index. This covered only three months’ worth of material but extended to over twenty pages with meticulously detailed headings such as ‘Collector-speculator and collector-amateur: a distinction’; ‘Cocoanuts [sic], ostrich eggs, shells, ivory, etc., used as bowls mounted in silver, England, early sixteenth century’ and ‘Orange, dull tint of, emblem of resignation, etc., among Oriental religious men­dicants’. This first index also listed all artists who had so far appeared in the Magazine, all works illustrated there and the names of the private collectors who owned them. Museums were not recorded as owners of works of art, but were noted in the index either for their acquisitions or gifts from private collections, or listed when there were some specific comments about them in the Magazine, such as: ‘National Gallery, neg­ligence of, contrasted with keenness of Berlin Museum’. As yet, very little mention was made of private galleries – the wealth of information on the art market contained in the Burlington’s Notes on Exhibitions only started a year later, in April 1904.1

Because of the scarcity of archival records for the Burlington’s early years we do not know who compiled this detailed and interesting resource. However, the tradition of inserting a printed index into each bound volume has continued without interruption from 1903 to the present: a printed index is now produced annually, in a more rational manner but with much less detail than its 1903 antecedent. Since 2003 the contents of the Magazine have been available digitally through JSTOR, and in 2004 the Magazine had the opportunity to begin to refine the limited free-text search facilities available from JSTOR when generous funding was received from the Scholarly Communications Programme of The Andrew Mellon Foundation to produce an online index. After six and a half years this is nearly complete and is now available and free for all to use.

The Burlington was ahead of its times in producing its first index in 1903 (no other comparable journal carried an index of such ­exceptional quality),2 and in 2011 it is, so far, the only art-historical periodical to have produced an online index. The amount of material it covers is vast and diverse: over thirty thousand articles ranging from Neolithic artefacts, cultural anthropology and children’s art to Chinese ceramics, Renaissance patronage and contemporary museum architecture. These texts are supported by over 120,000 illustrations, which are also being indexed. Academic journals are often indexed in closed-access resources, but the Burlington wanted its index to be an open-access tool for everyone interested in art and art history. It has therefore been created in a similar manner to online museum catalogues. This not only has the advantage of presenting itself with a structure already familiar to our readers, but is well suited to the predominantly object-based content of the Magazine. The alphabetical lists of contributors, artists, collectors and dealers, patrons, buildings, commercial galleries and museums recall the A–Z lists of artists in online collections catalogues. Comparative images have always been of crucial importance to the Burlington: even during the two World Wars, when paper was expensive and photographs scarce, the Magazine continued to be richly illustrated. The central role of images is preserved in the online index: all illustrations in the Magazine, except those in the advertising supplements, have been indexed and listed alphabetically under artists and media. These thousands of works of art by over seven thousand artists, when used in conjunction with the images provided by JSTOR, create a fully functioning digital photographic collection, where it is possible to search for ‘paintings formerly attributed to Titian’ or ‘prints after Rembrandt’. Inconsistencies and duplicates are the bane of such large projects, and in the Burlington index these have been avoided by rigorously applying a methodology based on strictly defined categories and by the use of thesauri such as the Getty Union List of Artists’ Names (also used to support the many variants of artists’ names) and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus. There is always the fear that, with such a large amount of material, some inaccuracies may have crept in and no doubt our readers – never slow to point out errors in our monthly issues – will have suggestions for amendments.

The index’s chief aim is to provide a resource for scholars by making fully searchable all the Burlington’s editorial content. Headings include such general concepts as ‘Italian painting’, ‘German sculpture’, ‘Social history’, ‘Surrealism’, ‘Critical reception’, ‘Museums’ history’, as well as more specific keywords such as ‘Mimesis’, ‘Ut pictura poesis’, ‘Kuan Yao’, ‘Cassiano dal Pozzo’, ‘Raqqa’, etc. Secondly, the index aims to open up the Burlington as a primary source for research: its early decades are invaluable for the history of exhibitions, the international art market, formalist art history and the rise of interest in modern art in Britain; its 108 years’ run is vital testimony to the history of art history and its methodologies. Lastly, at a time when art history is increasingly the history of social and economic forces, the Burlington, with its wide-ranging, interconnected coverage of art history and collecting, criticism and the art market, deserves the fullest exploration. The index also contains a complete list of its contributors – over two thousand – from 1903 until today. Some of them, such as Roger Fry, Walter Sickert, E.H. Gombrich, Kenneth Clark and Anthony Blunt, are well known. Others, such as Egerton Beck, Robert R. Tatlock (Editor in the 1920s) and the furniture historian Margaret Jourdain, are still largely unexplored. Yet others, like the mysterious ‘Modern Painter’ who contributed in 1907, and many who only initialled their articles, still need to be identified, to join the famous, occasional contributors that include Henry James, Arthur Waley, Osbert Sitwell, Oskar Kokoschka and Georg Baselitz. This online index, to be updated on a monthly basis, makes available the richness of the Magazine’s past material to a new generation of readers and scholars.

1    This kind of information, however, was available in the short-lived and little-known Burlington Gazette which ran for six months in 1903.
2    Leading contemporary publications such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in France and Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft in Germany had no index at all.