Finding Art Images Online

There are abundant resources for locating art images online. Google Image Search is quick and simple, but the images retrieved are often small and of low resolution and attempts to find the original source often lead to dead links. Try using Goggle Images Advanced Search, limiting to show large images only. Most search engines offer similar tools (MSN Search, Yahoo, Alta Vista). For questions relating to copyright see U.S. Copyright particularly Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use and Wikipedia:Public domain image resources.

TC3 students and staff have access, through our subscription databases, to CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online), an online art collection from prominent art museums. The Department of Art History at Binghamton University has created a Visual Resources Collection of over 6,000 digitized fine art images in SUNY DSpace, available for educational use across the SUNY System. The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) Digital Image Library has "1,731 original fashion design illustrations from FIT's Special Collections."

Many art museums have digitized much of their collections and offer searchable databases. Some of the larger museum image collections are listed below. Some museums (MoMA, Tate) allow you to register to save images and create sets. Another useful source is auction galleries like Christies or Sothebys.

American Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology Collections Database - New York (over 175,000 images)
British Museum - London (5,000)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Has one of the largest collection of images on the Web with over 82,000 objects.
Polo Museale Fiorentino
George Eastman House Collections - Rochester, New York
Guggenheim Images - New York. You can browse by artist
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (over 70,000 images)
Louvre Atlas - Paris (over 30,000 images). Also available in English
Metropolitan Museum - New York (over 130,000 images)
Museum of Fine Arts - Boston (30,000)
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - New York. "5,847 artsts and 29,835 works online." (on 3 September 2009)
National Gallery of Art - Washington, D.C. (more than 6,000 objects - be sure to check the images only box)
National Gallery of Canada Cybermuse - Has an artists index
National Portrait Gallery - London (37,759 images)
National Portrait Gallery - Maintains the Catalog of American Portraits, images and data for more than "80,000 portrait records in public and private collections across the United States and abroad".
Rijksmuseum - Amsterdam. Browse by artist.
State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection - St. Petersburg
Tate Gallery - London (65,000)
Victoria & Albert Museum - London (over 56,000 works and over 86,000 images)

Other useful resources include:

Ad*Access - Duke University Libraries (7,000 images)
Agence photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux - Searchable database of art owned by selected French museums with over 100,000 color images and over 500,000 black & white images.
Archnet - Muslim cultures and civilisations.
Art History Resources on the Web - Chris Witcombe. Has links to Museums & Galleries.
Artcyclopedia - Commercial site has "indexed 1800 art sites, and offers over 60,000 links to an estimated 150,000 artworks by 8,100 renowned artists."
Collage - City of London Libraries, Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery. "Over 20,000 works of art from its collections."
Life Photo Archive - "Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive."
World Art Treasures - Berger Foundation, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Web Gallery of Art - "Virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 22,600 reproductions."

Last update: Thursday, May 12, 2011