Research Guides: Photos and Images: Art

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Image Collections in the CMU Library

ARTstor Digital Library (now referred to as JSTOR Images) This link opens in a new window
Provides more than one million digital images from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, and photo archives. Subject matters include art, architecture, music, religion, anthropology, literature, world history, American Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, the sciences, and more.

Museums and Galleries

British Museum
"The Museum’s entire digitised database to date can be found here. New records and images are added every week. When complete the database will contain a record of every object in the Museum collection, with associated conservation and scientific reports where available."
Cleveland Museum of Art-Art Collection Online
The Cleveland Museum of Art was founded in 1913 “for the benefit of all the people forever.” 1 We strive to help the broadest possible audience understand and engage with the world’s great art.
J. Paul Getty Museum
More than 4,600 high-quality digital images available in the public domain and searchable through the Getty Search Gateway.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Search collections by artist, maker, culture, technique, material, geographic location, era or date of art.
MFA Images-Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Today the MFA is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world; the collection encompasses nearly 450,000 works of art.
Musee du Louvre
You can perform a simple search, advanced search, search by room, department and recent acquisitions. Knowledge of French is most useful for getting the most out of this database.
Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
Search collection by artist name, title, department, classification, year made.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
"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." Filter results by medium, nationality, time span, styles, images.
National Gallery of Art-NGA Images
A repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. You can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 22,000 open access digital images are available free of charge for download and use.
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
"Search more than 15,000 records from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery. NPG's collections of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs document the diversity of individuals who have made significant contributions to the history and culture of the United States."

More Image Collections

New York Public Library 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."
vads: the online resource for visual arts
VADS is a searchable online resource with image collections covering fashion, textiles, architecture, design, posters, political cartoons, photography, sculpture, painting and more. The collections are UK centric as the resource was created for use by educators and students in the UK.