On 21 October, the Oliveira Lima Library and the Art Library entered into a partnership with the aim of promoting the research, processing, preservation and dissemination of their collections and archives related to the history and historiography of art in Portugal and Brazil, with a particular emphasis on the Baroque period.

The Oliveira Lima Library was founded in 1920 following the donation of the private collection of the Brazilian diplomat and scholar Manuel Oliveira Lima (1867–1928) and his wife, Flora (1863–1940), to the Catholic University of America in Washington.

Assembled over the course of his career, the initial collection consisted of 45,000 books, mostly in Portuguese, covering literature, history and the culture of Brazil and Portugal from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century.

After the death of its donor and first director, the Oliveira Lima Library continued to grow in number of volumes, also gathering archival materials, cartography and works of art, including prints, paintings and sculptures.

With more than 60,000 volumes, the Oliveira Lima Library can be regarded as a reference library for the study of Portuguese culture worldwide.

A key figure in the study of Portuguese and Brazilian art history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the American art historian Robert C. Smith (1912–1975) forms a link between the Oliveira Lima Library and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In the course of his research, he drew on the holdings of the Oliveira Lima Library, whose second director – the Azorean historian Manuel da Silveira Cardoso (1911–1985) – was among his circle of friends. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, for its part, enabled him to carry out a substantial part of his studies on the Baroque and was the institution to which he decided to bequeath his documentary archive.

Designated the Robert C. Smith Archive, it is now part of the documentary holdings of the Art Library and comprises a wide range of written and visual materials.

Image: Manuel de Oliveira Lima with Thomas Joseph Shahan and Three Others, Washington, DC, [1924?]. [Photographic collection]. Oliveira Lima Library. Catholic University of America. Learn more