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. Most search engines offer similar tools (MSN Search, Yahoo, Alta Vista).

Many art museums have digitized much of their collections and offer searchable databases. Chris Witcombe's Art History Resources on the Web has links to Museums & Galleries as does Jonathan Bowen in his Virtual Library museums pages. Some of the larger museum image collections are listed below.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has one of the largest collection of images on the Web with over 82,000 objects in its ImageBase
American Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology Collections Database (135,000)
Tate Gallery in London (65,000)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (over 60,000 images)
National Portrait Gallery in London (37,759)
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (30,000)
Victoria & Albert Museum in London (with almost 24,000 objects in its Access to Images)
National Gallery of Canada (over 10,000 images in Cybermuse)
Ad*Access (7,000)
Metropolitan Museum in New York (6,500)
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (more than 5,600 images - be sure to check the images only box)
British Museum's Compass database (5,000)
George Eastman House Photograpy Collections Online
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
State Hermitage Museum Digital Collection in St. Petersburg

The Agence photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux is a searchable database of art owned by selected French museums with over 100,000 color images and over 500,000 black & white images. ART[image] is a joint digitization project of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. MOAC searches collections in California museums.

Though it is a subscription database, the Library of the the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is searchable and provides thumbnails of over 100,000 works of art owned by members. Other useful resources include the Perseus Digital Library (search for architecture), Archnet, ArtServe, Artist Index, World Art Treasures, and Collage Portal.

Commercial resources include the Artcyclopedia, which has "indexed 1800 art sites, and offer over 60,000 links to an estimated 150,000 artworks by 8,100 renowned artists," Mark Harden's Artchive, Web Gallery of Art, a database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1200-1700), currently containing over over 13,500 reproductions, and Nicolas Pioch's WebMuseum, one of the earliest image collections on the Web, and CGFA: A Virtual Art Museum For detailed, in-depth information, see TASI: Technical Advisory Service for Images for a very useful guide to Finding Images Online as well as a searchable database of Image Sites.

Last update: Monday, February 11, 2008