Art & Art History: Online Collections of Art

The Cranach archive provides access to art historical, technical and conservation information on paintings by Lucas Cranach, his sons and his workshop. This website is in German.

Searchable database of images of some of the western illuminated manuscripts in the British Library.

Archive of digitized material on the research of the works of Raphael collected and housed by the National Gallery.

All collected letters written and received by Vincent van Gogh presented as an online edition.

An aggregation of digital library websites built for researchers, scholars and fair use purposes. It has film, audio, video, texts, the Wayback Machine and even software!

Search materials published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1964 to the present. Current titles that are in-print may be previewed and searched online, while most texts that are out of print can be fully read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF.

3.5 million objects from the collection for Fair Use purposes. Most images are under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please see their Terms of Use for further information.

Selected items from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library. Materials selected for digitization expand access to the Library’s rare and unique materials by developing, supporting, and promoting a distinctive digital collection of these items and fall outside the parameters of other digitization efforts.

Thousands of high quality downloadable images of artworks from LACMA in the public domain—available without restriction, free of charge for educational use.

Over 125,000 images from the Rijksmuseum.

High quality digital images.

International directory of museums.

Art museums worldwide as listed by Artcyclopedia.

Freely accessible print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services.

The Frick is known for their Old Master paintings and European sculpture and decorative arts.

Moma is dedicated to preserving, collecting, and displaying modern art in order to make it accessible to the public.

From Byzantine altarpieces to pop art, learn all about paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and other works in the collection.

The online collection of the Cleveland Museum. Please review their Rights and Restrictions for image use, including personal and fair use purposes.

Approximately 225,000 online works from the Harvard Art Museums Collections. Please refer to their Terms of Use under Permitted Uses.

Objects housed in the Museum of Fine Arts Collection. Please review their Terms of Use, even for Fair Use purposes.

Approximately 87,000 images from The National Portrait Gallery Collection are accessible for academic and non-commercial purposes. The licensing will vary by image. Click on the image, then underneath the image there will be Use this Image. If you click on that link there will be more information on the licensing of that image. The academic, "low resolution" image should suffice for many purposes at 2400 pixels per side and 300dpi. If you would prefer a high resolution image, please contact me and I'll acquire one for the VRC.