The Tuck Langland Collection

Tuck Langland has been a professional sculptor for more than forty years. His public sculptures are found throughout the world from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington to the performing arts center in Honolulu. His smaller sculptures are to be found in the collections of some eight museums, including the British Museum in London and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne.

Tuck is first vice president of the National Sculpture Society, an Academician in the National Academy of Art, professor emeritus at Indiana University South Bend (where he taught from 1971 to 2003), and the author of two acclaimed books on sculpture Practical Sculpture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1988) and From Clay to Bronze, A Studio Guide to Figurative Sculpture (New York, 1999).

One of Tuck's passions that began during his college years has been Gothic Architecture. Since 1960, he has been traveling to Europe, often with the sole purpose of seeing more churches and photographing them. Now that he has retired from the university, he rarely has the opportunity to lecture from his slides. Tuck is glad to be able to share them with others through this collaboration with the Index of Christian Art in Princeton.

This collection covers nearly three thousand images of architectural and art historical interest for the medievalist which were taken over the last forty years. The buildings detailed in this collection range from the sacred to the secular with a strong emphasis on the cathedral. Covering just England and France the collection ranges from the better known buildings to some unknown treasures. All of the images were taken by Tuck Langland and the approach to each building attempts to be as consistent as possible; each building is firstly photographed from the exterior and then internal shots are given which normally start at the eastern end and proceed to the west through the transepts and choir with shots of the vaults taken where possible. The data given with each image is minimal but as these works will be fully catalogued they will be transferred to the Index of Christian Art.

As it presently stands the data for each image is limited to three fields; Country (England, France), Location (Name of building eg. Gloucester Cathedral, St. Benoit-sur-Loire: Church ) and Sequence (Details of the image eg. Interior Nave, from the west).

It is with great pleasure that the Index of Christian Art makes this resource available to the scholarly community and thanks must go to the owner Tuck Langland for allowing us to digitize and catalogue the collection as well as to Marie Holzman, Katie McCullough, David Schaller, Barbara Shearn, and Mark Syp for their work on the archive. The database was designed by Jon Niola of the Index of Christian Art.

Colum Hourihane, Director, Index of Christian Art

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