No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Several CD-ROMs offer immense libraries of clip art, but this is the only one that offers a gallery of fine art. The disc contains 3,093 images, most of them in color, photographed from the National Portrait Gallery's Permanent Collection of Notable Americans, based on the 1987 Illustrated Checklist. This compact disc for DOS computers is obviously an invaluable resource for art classes, but students and teachers of social studies and other disciplines can profit from it as well. The list of subjects' occupations (Figure 1) provides an idea of why the disc is appropriate to courses that study the history of literature, education, politics, science, and visual and performing arts. The disc lends itself to a variety of approaches for class use. For example, portraits of writers would be of interest to literature classes, while art classes might prefer to access the collection by artist or by choosing from a total of 346 specified media, such as India ink on paper, watercolor on cardboard, or oil on canvas.
Visiting the National Portrait Gallery on a computer offers an advantage that even a personal visit cannot achieve, notably the ability to become one's own curator by arranging the works in a customized sequence. Having the option to view the portraits by subject, artist, date, or medium frees the observer from the inevitable constraints Estelle Irizarry is a professor of Spanish at Georgetown University and Courseware Editor of CHum. She teaches a course in Hispanic art as related to literature and has published several books on the subject.
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