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# Hispanic Society puts more than 6,000 works online, from Goya prints to 1920s photos of Spain
- URL: https://www.urgentmatter.press/hispanic-society-puts-more-than-6000-works-online-from-goya-prints-1920s-photos-of-spain/
- Published: 2026-10-10T02:27:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-10T02:27:32.000Z
- Description: The museum expects to finish scanning all of Ruth Matilda Anderson's roughly 14,000 negatives by the end of 2028.
- Author: Adam Schrader
- Tags: Science and Technology, #public-access

The Hispanic Society Museum & Library has put more than 6,000 works from its collections online for free, including thousands of photographs Ruth Matilda Anderson took in Spain, Portugal and North Africa in the 1920s that until now could be viewed only on-site or in the museum’s own exhibitions and publications.

The first phase of the museum’s [Digital Collections Portal](https://diglib.hispanicsociety.org/?ref=urgentmatter.press), which went live in September, also includes high-quality scans of all four of Francisco de Goya’s major print series, 45 books printed in the Americas before 1601 and manuscripts from the Spanish Philippines, Brett Lazer, the museum’s manager of digital strategy and marketing, told Urgent Matter in emailed responses.

Only some of the Goya prints had been available digitally before, Lazer said.

“The Hispanic Society is an active research institution and we are deeply committed to facilitating access to our collections for scholars across the world. In 2026 that means making objects available digitally so researchers don’t need to physically be here to work with our collections,” Lazer said.

“With no disrespect to the other collections, it is definitely the Ruth Matilda Anderson negatives,” Lazer said when asked where readers should start. “They are unique to the Hispanic Society and they reflect, with incredible detail and humanistic vision, the texture of a bygone world.”

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Anderson, who lived from 1893 to 1983, worked as a photographer and researcher for the museum. She was sent on four trips between 1924 and 1930 to photograph monuments, landscapes and village life, the portal’s Anderson collection page shows.

“Anderson was an early curator at the museum. The museum’s founder, Archer Huntington, sent her to the Iberian Peninsula to produce photographic documentation of Spain and Portugal to further the Hispanic Society’s goal of promoting the understanding of the Hispanic world to a U.S. audience,” Lazer said.

Her first trip, starting in July 1924, took her through Galicia, Asturias, León and Madrid with her father, Alfred T. Anderson. Frances Spalding, a museum colleague, joined her in Galicia and León in 1925 and 1926.

The two women later worked in Extremadura and Portugal. Their last trip in the series, from October 1929 to November 1930, took them to Morocco, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira and Andalucía, among other stops.

A mapping tool on the portal lets viewers trace her route across all four trips, Lazer said.

“Some of her photographs stand as the only surviving visual documentation of her subjects,” he said.

The Anderson collection runs to just over 14,000 negatives. The collection page shows that more than 5,000 have been digitized and cataloged so far. Lazer said the museum expects to finish digitizing the rest by the end of 2028.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/2026/10/goya_print_single_lq1418.png)

Francisco Goya's **Viejo Columpiándose. (Old man on a swing.)* 

The negatives are mostly nitrate film, with a smaller group of glass plates, the collection page shows.

Patrick Lenaghan, the museum’s head of prints and photographs, said the team “was very surprised to find that Ruth Anderson’s negatives – now roughly 100 years old – are actually preserved in quite good condition.”

Lenaghan said the digitization staff applied classic darkroom techniques to the scans. The collection page identifies them as dodging and burning, used to adjust tone without adding reconstructed image data.

Galician newspapers, including Faro de Vigo, El Correo Gallego and El Progreso, published stories on Anderson’s photographs of 1920s Vigo, Santiago de Compostela and Lugo between September 11 and September 14, a press list on the collection page shows.

The museum’s Goya Research Center has spent several years promoting interest in the artist, and scanning his prints was “a natural step in line with the Center’s work,” Lazer said.

“Works on paper are notoriously fragile and particularly light-sensitive. For some of the works, conservation issues may impact the ability of curators and librarians to make the physical objects available onsite,” Lazer said. “Now, everyone can view them digitally with no impact on the state of conservation of the original.”

Early American books include some of the first texts printed in Indigenous languages, including Quechua, Purépecha, Nahuatl and Aymara, the museum said in its announcement.

The museum scanned the books for [Primeros Libros de las Américas](https://primeroslibros.org/spotlight/primeros-libros-de-las-americas/about/primeros-libros-de-las-americas?ref=urgentmatter.press), an online collection of books printed in the Americas before 1601, said Javier Milligan, head of the museum’s Modern Library. The project’s website says about 155 of the roughly 240 editions thought to have been printed in Mexico and Peru in that period survive in institutions around the world.

“Seeing them all together, rather than as discrete objects, makes it clear that while the history of printing in the Americas in that early period is often thought of as one of European texts and European languages, the role of indigenous communities, languages, and texts is actually enormously important,” Milligan said.

“A digital copy brings a work to a broad audience, but to understand it requires information about its language, production, provenance, historical context, and use,” he said.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/2026/10/Anderson_5418_NN_22505.png)

Boy Looking Out From a Glass Door Window. Photo by Ruth Matilda Anderson

The Spanish Philippines manuscripts, which include letters, sermons and court case records written in Spanish, Latin, Tagalog, Italian and Traditional Chinese, were scanned with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and are still being uploaded, the portal’s Philippines collection page shows.

“Spanish evangelization, armed conflict with Indigenous groups, and Spanish suspicion of what they considered Indigenous ‘idolatry’ appear throughout the collection,” said Matthew Palmer, a library assistant at the museum. “We feel it is important to make these documents available so that people in the present can study them.”

“Some of the documents have not been consulted since they were catalogued by a book dealer in the early 20th century,” Palmer said.

The portal carries a statement warning users that the works and older catalog descriptions may contain offensive or harmful language. For Indigenous languages, the catalog uses the name each language’s speakers use for it rather than the name in the source text, “to avoid the perpetuation of colonial naming conventions in our descriptive practices,” the Philippines collection page says.

Lazer said the manuscripts are part of a push to feature work from the Philippines. In 2027, the museum will show work by a contemporary Filipina artist, whom he did not name, alongside objects from its collection tied to the Manila galleon trade route, which linked Manila and Acapulco from 1565 to 1815.

“People might think of the Hispanic Society as the repository of a set of great paintings by the big names from the history of Spanish art, but we are so much more than that,” Lazer said.

Urgent Matter [previously reported](https://www.urgentmatter.press/hispanic-society-museum-acquires-first-portuguese-paintings-wifredo-lam-work/) in April that the museum had acquired its first Portuguese paintings and a 1927 portrait by Wifredo Lam, as director Guillaume Kientz worked to build its Portuguese and Brazilian holdings.

The museum, founded by [Archer Milton Huntington in 1904](https://hispanicsociety.org/about/?ref=urgentmatter.press), holds well over 200,000 objects, a count rising above 750,000 with the Modern Library’s holdings, Lazer said. He said the museum will keep adding to the portal as long as funding allows.

Lazer said the project was funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, GRoW @ Annenberg, the Achelis & Bodman Foundation, the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson and the Henry Luce Foundation.

The museum takes part in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator, which has committed $128 million to technology grants and training for arts groups in the U.S. and U.K. since 2021, the foundation said.

Many digitized items are in the public domain and can be reused without the museum’s permission, the portal’s about page says. The site’s catalog data is released into the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 license.

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