LibGuides: Art History: Images

Selected Image Databases in Art History

Large repositories of art images

ARTstor
Searchable database of digital images and associated catalog data, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here.

Select museum collections

Digital museum collections are a great place to find high-quality reproductions of works of art, as well as all the information you need to properly caption your images. Below you will find a selection of New York City museums (and a couple of others too), which have strong digital collections online.

Getty Open Content Images
Find selected digitized materials from the Research Institute's collection that are free to view and download. Materials include over 2.5 million digital images of rare and public domain books, photographs, prints, manuscripts, sketchbooks, and archives.
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Collection
The Met's collections - including over 5,000 years of art from around the globe - are accessible through this online database. You can search by artist or culture, object type or material, geographic location, date or era, and by department. Select "Public Domain Artworks" to limit your search to only those images that are free to use without permission.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
An evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works of modern and
contemporary art. More than 77,000 works are currently available online.
National Gallery of Art
Search the entire National Gallery of Art collection by artist's last name, key words in the title, key words in object information, credit line, provenance name, accession number, exhibition history, and/or catalogue raisonné. You will be able to filter your search results by medium, nationality, time span, styles, images, and whether an object is on view.
Studio Museum in Harlem
The Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection represents more than 400 artists, spans 200 years of history and includes over 2,200 works of art, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, watercolors, photographs, videos and mixed-media installations.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Explore the Whitney's collection of over 23,000 works, created by more than 3,000 American artists during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. See work on view in our galleries below, or browse the full collection.