Subject & Research Guides: Art, Art History & Architectural Studies: Image Resources

Finding Images

Most art research involves finding images to inspire your own work or to illustrate your arguments in a paper. Images can be appended to the end of your paper and also used for in-class presentations. Finding high-quality images can be difficult when using a simple Google image search, and the use of some images may violate copyright laws.

The resources on this page provide access to high-quality images available specifically for research and instructional use. Many of these collections allow you to browse by medium, genre, or subject, which will lead you to discover works of art that are new to you.

Remember: if you cannot find an image you need online, you may find it in a related monograph or exhibition catalogue in the library. Use the in-house scanner to make a digital reproduction for your paper or presentation.

Copyright and Fair Use

The principle of Fair Use, a part of US copyright law, allows students, scholars, educators, librarians, and archivists to use reproductions (analog slides or digital images) of copyrighted works for academic purposes, including analytical writing and teaching about art, as well as making art; however, some limitations do apply. For example:

the analytic or pedagogical objective of the writer or presenter should justify use of the work
artists' creations incorporating copyrighted works should explicitly generate new artistic meaning through the appropriation of that source material
all uses of visual reproductions of artworks must be accompanied by attributions, including a citation of the original work's creator, title, date, materials, and dimensions, as well as the copyright-holding individual or institution and the source of the reproduction
in many cases of museums and private collections, a "sole source" maintains control over all reproductions of an artwork, so it is always important to look for language regarding the use of any images obtained from textual and online resources

For more information, refer to the College Art Association's Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts (2015) or contact Lyndsay Bratton (x2729).

Google Art Project

The Google Art Project is a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed museums to enable anyone to explore museum collections using Street View technology. Discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Create your own collection and save specific views of any of the more than 45,000 artworks.

Digital Image Collections

In addition to the websites and databases provided here, you can find high-resolution digital collections on many other museum and archives websites.

ARTstor
Commercial Pattern Archive (CoPA)
The Commercial Pattern Archive database provides a unique tool for researchers and designers to recreate or date clothing from 1847 to present. Collections from the US, Canada and the UK are represented in the database which functions like a Union Catalog of pattern collections. The Pattern Archive is a project of the US Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Costume Commission. The cornerstone of CoPA is the Betty Williams Collection. Betty Williams, a theatrical costumer in New York City, pioneered research on commercial patterns in the early 1980s.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library.
Europeana
An internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitized throughout Europe. More than 2,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana.
Flickr: Creative Commons Search
Flickr is a great image resource for architecture and architectural details, as travelers around the world upload their own images of built structures. You can do an advanced search here for a building or architect and check the Creative Commons box to search for content that has been offered under the Creative Commons license.
Internet Archive Book Image Photostream
Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University, created an archive of 2.6 million public domain images, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500-year period. This archive will grow to 14.6 million images.
Internet Archive Images
This library contains digital images uploaded by Archive users which range from maps to astronomical imagery to photographs of artwork.
J. Paul Getty Museum
The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Explore nearly 400,000 works of art from the Museum's encyclopedic collection.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Browse or search MoMA New York's extensive online collection.
National Gallery of Art
NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. More than 42,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.
New Museum of Contemporary Art Digital Archive
Contains documentation of the New Museum's program and institutional history in the form of images, video, audio, publications and printed matter.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online includes over 18,000 images ranging from artworks and artists' signatures to architectural drawings and photography.
Wellcome Images
The Wellcome Library houses unique collections relating to both art and medicine. The thousands of online images show manuscripts, etchings, paintings, photographs, advertisements, and artifacts.
Yale Center for British Art Collections
The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, presenting the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period to the present day. High-resolution images for the entire paintings and sculpture collection, as well as a significant proportion of the prints and drawings collection, are available online.