Research Guides: Art & Art History: Finding Images

Images Online

These websites organize online images for scholarly use with many archival and art images.

Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
A website dedicated to the principle of free exchange of image resources for and among members of the educational community.
NYPL Digital Library
A living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Google Arts & Culture
Artworks, collections, and stories from all around the world in a new way and explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail.
Web Gallery of Art
Virtual museum of Western Fine art.
Worldimages
Approximately 80,000+ images are held in this image database brought by San Jose State University. Please check the conditions of use for each image that is utilized in your project. For further inquiries please contact me at the information below.
Dickinson's Visual Resources Collection
Must be on campus and affiliated with Dickinson to use.
Yale University's Digital Collections
Yale University Library's database for their digital collection.
Wikipaintings
Over 125,000 images from the Rijksmuseum.
Digital Image Collections Wiki
Collections of free and fair-use images sources online created to assist users at Wellesley College.
The British Library
Collection of maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings, etc.
The Getty's Open Content Program
More than 99,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program, including 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), and much more
Artsy
Fair Use downloadable images from Artsy. All periods including Contemporary and Modern work. This is the only page on Artsy that provides downloadable images within the public domain. In general, this site is rich with Contemporary and Modern work, and may include current gallery information, such as price and provenance. Artsy also has an iPhone app
Bridgeman Education Image Bank
Copyright cleared educational use image database. Over 500,000 images that can be downloaded for fair use purposes, placed in their own presentation system, or filed in your personal account. Each user must register initially for the free trial, which is 14 days.
Europeana
European based digital images, videos, and exhibitions. Hundreds of European institutions that aggregate their material such as, prints, sculpture, drawings, architecture, photographs, and paintings. Commons copyright friendly and open source.

For More Information...

See the page for Dickinson's Visual Resources Center.

Images in Databases

These are image databases that you have access to as a Dickinson College student. ARTstor is the largest and premier database for art and architecture images online.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Artstor website retires as a separate website on Aug. 1, 2024; Get started with Artstor on JSTOR
Explore quality images covering the visual arts, architecture, archaeology, fashion, geography, the performing arts, science, and technology. Collections feature visual media from leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists, which have been rights-cleared for educational use. ***It is necessary to turn off your browser's pop-up blocker for ARTstor to work properly.*** Recommended instructions for using ARTstor are available on Youtube and the ARTstor website. Coverage: all eras, contains primary sources. Full text.

Bridgeman Art Library
Images of art masterpieces of all varieties: historical, European, Asian, American, and more.

Berg Fashion Library (Bloomsbury) This link opens in a new window
Access eBooks, museum exhibitions, images, lesson plans and bibliographic guides on fashion and related fields, including the full text of the Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and an extensive color image bank. This collection is useful for research in fashion, theatre & dance, anthropology, art history, history, American studies, and cultural studies. Coverage: varies, contains primary sources. Full text.
Index of Medieval Art This link opens in a new window
Access images of Christian, secular, and other religiously oriented Medieval art, in color and black and white images. This collection includes art from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture. Coverage: late antiquity to the 16th century, contains primary sources. Full text.
Photography: The World Through the Lens This link opens in a new window
Access photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography, from Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. This collection is part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO). Coverage: 1840s to 1910s, contains primary sources. Full text.

Images from Museums

Many museums are now offering high quality scans of their collections online for use by students and scholars.

Getty Open Content Program
The Getty Museum's program to allow open access to images of their collections.
LACMA - Image Library
Thousands of high quality downloadable images of artworks from LACMA in the public domain—available without restriction, free of charge for educational use.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Image & Data Resources
The MMA "makes available data from the entire online collection―both works it believes to be in the public domain and those under copyright or other restrictions―including basic information such as title, artist, date, medium, and dimensions. This data is available to all in accordance with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation."
NGA Images
Open access images from the National Gallery of Art available to download for educational use.
Rijksstudio
Over 125,000 images from the Rijksmuseum.
Smithsonian Institution
An online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from their museums, archives, libraries, and research units.
Walters Art Museum
High quality digital images.

Waidner-Spahr Library

Art & Art History: Finding Images

Images Online

For More Information...

Images in Databases

Images from Museums