The Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (DAC) has contributed more than 6,300 images from their permanent collection to the Artstor Digital Library.

The DAC collection consists of some 24,000 works on paper, mostly prints and photographs, as well as objects in other media. The selection in Artstor includes many highlights and provides a focus on European prints from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

The Davison print collection is among the finest in American college museums. It includes impressions by Dürer and Northern and Italian Renaissance artists: Rembrandt and his contemporaries; Goya; nineteenth-century French painter-printmakers such as Manet and Millet; and American modern and contemporary artists, especially Jim Dine. The collection includes multiple states of many prints, providing a historical window into techniques and creative processes. There are also about 600 Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts and significant holdings illuminating the early histories of mezzotint and lithography.

The DAC’s photographs range from calotypes and daguerreotypes made in the 1840s to work by later photographers such as Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott, and images by contemporary artists including Duane Michals and Cindy Sherman.

The DAC was established in 1952 in an addition to the Alsop House on the campus of Wesleyan University. The historic house dates to the pre-Civil War period, built between 1838-1840 by Richard Alsop IV. In 1948, it was purchased by Wesleyan with funds given by Harriet and George W. Davison (B.A. Wesleyan 1892), who also donated the founding collection, some 6,000 prints from their personal collection. They commissioned the renovation and restoration of the house, including the addition of the museum, according to the design of architect A.L. Harmon.