ART Visual Arts: Find Images

A collaboration between scholars at the University of Bristol, University of Lincoln, and the Institut d'Asie Orientale. This project aims to locate, archive, and disseminate photographs from the holdings of modern China images held in private hands overseas.

The Archive aspires to include all the figurative African objects in books, periodicals, catalogues, newspapers, and other publications appearing in 1920 and earlier - the oldest dates to 1591. The Archive does not include postcards or pamphlets of limited distribution, and focuses exclusively on figurative art.

The Aga Khan Visual Archive (AKVA) consists of over 120,000 slides and digital images of architecture, urbanism, and the building environment in the Islamic world, donated by students, scholars, and architectural firms. The images span a 30-year period and document historic and contemporary sites in the Islamic world, often depicting sites not found in any published resource.

The Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968) Photographs digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia. The site currently features photographs dated between 1917 and 1932; the 1908 photographs will be digitized and uploaded as part of future additions to the site.

Gothic Past is an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. The site showcases images from three significant collections of image archives housed in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College. They include the Stalley Collection and the Rae Collection of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture: photographic images that were created and collected from the 1930s to the present day. A third archive contains the O’Donovan collection of Irish Gothic moulding profiles.

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK.

The Yale Center for British Art is a public art museum and research institute for the study of British art and culture. Presented to Yale University by Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929), the Center houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom.

A great resource for digital images.

The Asian Art Museum is home to one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. Spanning 6,000 years and including more than 17,000 objects, the collection provides an introduction to the major traditions of Asian art and culture.

The British Museum collection’s online database contains images of almost two million objects from the entire Museum collection.

LACMA has about 20,000 high-res digital downloads for any use.

Currently, there are more than 87,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program. This includes more than 72,000 from the Research Institute's Foto Arte Minore archive, which features photographs of the art and architecture of Italy over 30 years by German photographer and scholar Max Hutzel (1913–1988). Other images include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks.

Recently released a vast archive of 400,000 (mostly) high-resolution digital Images online that you can download and use for non-commercial use.

The Cloisters branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. The building and its cloistered gardens—located in Fort Tryon Park in Northern Manhattan—are treasures in themselves, effectively part of the collection housed there. The Cloisters collection comprises approximately three thousand works of art.

The collection, which focuses on the major schools of European and American painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and decorative arts from the 12th through the 20th century, includes the Andrew W. Mellon Collection, the Widener Collection, the Samuel H. Kress Collection, the Chester Dale Collection, and the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of prints.

The National Gallery, London houses one of the greatest collections of Western European painting in the world. These pictures belong to the public and entrance to see them is free. All major traditions of Western European painting are represented from the artists of late medieval and Renaissance Italy to the French Impressionists.

The Seattle Art Museum is home to a premier collection of Chinese art in North America, which was formed largely in the twentieth century during the directorship of museum founder Dr. Richard E. Fuller (director 1933-73). Although Seattle’s Chinese collection is best known for its jades, ceramics, and later Buddhist sculpture, the collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy has grown substantially, adding important works of the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This database contains over 7.4 million records with 568,100 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives, and libraries.

The Research and Scholars Center Newsletter is a biannual e-newsletter. Our goal is to keep you up-to-date on the Museum’s American art research resources and scholarly events.

accessCeramics is a growing image collection of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists. It is intended to fill a void in the contemporary ceramic image collections on the web and is designed for use by artists, art educators, scholars, and the general public.

Artsy’s mission is to make the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Powered by The Art Genome Project, It is a free website with a library of over 50,000 images from over 650 museum, nonprofit, and gallery partners.

Built on the art of ancient Greece and Rome, CLAROS is an international research collaboration that uses the latest information and communication technologies to enable simultaneous searching of major collections in research institutes and museums.

Approximately 20,500 images from this renowned archive.

More than 2.6 million historical copyright free images located on Flickr in a searchable database. The pictures originate from more than 600 million library book pages that were scanned by the Internet Archive and have been difficult to access until now.

The PPOC contains records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Library of Congress. Collections include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.

This website features digital versions of exhibitions previously hosted at the Newberry Library, an independent research library concentrating in the humanities with an active educational and cultural presence in Chicago. It houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, maps, music, manuscripts, and other printed material.

Provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from The New York Public Library’s vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

A compilation of art and architecture resources from across the web. Browse links by culture, region, subject, time period, type, etc. Brown University faculty websites and Rhode Island web resources are included.

The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator. He was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the 2nd half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain.

SepiaTown is a website that lets you search, view, and upload historical images by location.

Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

A non-profit international Foundation based in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, Italy with offices in the United States. It is dedicated to revealing the astonishing story of the most influential family dynasty in Western civilization: the Medici.