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Expos 20 DeYoung

How to Create a Figure List

When you discuss a work of art extensively in your essay, be sure to provide animage of that artwork at the end of the essay in a Figure List, much as you wouldlist books cited in the essay in a Bibliography or Works Cited. The image and

caption should take up the full page to allow the reader to make out the detailsdiscussed in the essay.

Each image should be labeled according to the order of its appearance in the essay,i.e. the first artwork mentioned becomes (Fig. 1), the second becomes (Fig. 2). Ona new page at the end of the essay titled Figure List include the image, figurenumber and caption information as you see here:

Fig. 1 - Charles Bird King (American, 1785 - 1862). The Vanity of the Artist's Dream, 1830.Oil and graphite on canvas; 89.22 x 74.93 cm. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museum, 1942.193.

In the caption, always be sure to include: Artist name (Nationality, life dates).Title, Date. Medium; dimensions. Collection City: Institution, ObjectNumber/Accession Number. If the information isnt easily available to you, then

For thepurposes

of thishandout,

this image& caption

do not takeup the fullpage, but

in youressay they

should.

This is whyusing high-res images

is soimportant

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Expos 20 DeYoung

ask me for further guidance. Dont forget that the Unit prompts and museumwebsites contain much of this information.

The caption generally appears below the image and both are centered on the page.

The preference for dimensions is for centimeters. You need not convert feet/inchesto centimeters, but any metric measurement (millimeters/meters) should be

converted to centimeters. Accurate dimensions can be found most easily via themuseum websites collection database.

Museum websites are the best sources for images. If one of your images appearson the course website in the slide viewer, double click on that image to access ahigh-res version.

If the name of the collection city is in the name of the institution you need notrepeat it, i.e. you can just write Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, not Boston: Museumof Fine Arts, Boston.

On first mention in your essay, give the title of the artwork and then its figure

number in parentheses to direct the reader to the end of the essay, i.e. WhistlersNocturne in Blue and Silver(Fig. 2) continues in a tradition established by Monet inhis View of the Sea at Sunset(Fig. 3). If there is a possibility for confusion later onabout which work is being discussed (two works with similar names for example),then you can continue to insert figure numbers as necessary.

How to Cite a Museum Label

For the citation of label text, since museum labels don't generally include curator

name, please include: Label text.Artwork title, date. Artist. Exhibition title (ifspecial exhibition), date, Museum, Location. For example:

Label text. The Vanity of the Artists Dream, 1830. Charles Bird King. Re-View, 2010, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.

In MLA, youd cite the label parenthetically (Label text) and then include it in theBibliography at the end. The more elegant solution and more frequent one in arthistory papers is to use Chicago-style citations and thus cite the label text via afootnote.1

1 Label text. The Vanity of the Artists Dream, 1830. Charles Bird King. Re-View, 2013,Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.