Art Resources: Museums

Offers access to over 95,000 works and basic information about works of art from all curatorial areas (African, American, Ancient and Byzantine, Architecture and Design, Arms, Armor, Medieval, and Renaissance, Asian, Contemporary, European Decorative Arts, European Painting and Sculpture, Indian Art of the Americans, Modern, Photography, Prints and Drawings, Textiles, and Thorne Miniature Rooms) of the collection.

Search over two million objects from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, Ancient Greece and Rome, European objects from the earliest times to the present day, objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, ancient and contemporary Middle East, Japanese, Korea, China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, South and Southeast Asia from the Asian Neolithic period to the present. The database is growing with updates weekly.

The Denver Art Museum is one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast, with a collection of more than 70,000 works of art divided between 10 permanent collections including African, American Indian, Asian, European and American, modern and contemporary, pre-Columbian, photography, Spanish Colonial, textile, and western American art. Our holdings reflect our city and region—and provide invaluable ways for the community to learn about cultures from around the world.

Currently, there are over 100,000 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). Other images include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. We are adding more images as high-quality digital files become available.

Google Arts & Culture features content from over 1200 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

Featuring nearly 1700 artworks by more than 575 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of more than 7,000 artworks. The selected works reflect the breadth, diversity, and tenor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s extensive holdings from the late 19th century through the present day, and are continually expanded to include a larger representation of the museum’s core holdings as well as recent acquisitions.

With over three million pieces of art representing many times and peoples, the State Hermitage has captured the essence of world culture. The online Collection Highlights provides a sample of the exquisite treasures that make up the Hermitage. From Paleolithic to contemporary, you can study some of the most extraordinary works of art in the world, including details about each piece represented here and histories of the civilizations that created them. High resolution images from 27 different categories of works of art.

High resolution images of national treasures and important cultural properties owned by 4 National Museums (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Kyusyu) with 5 languages commentary.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna numbers among the most important European museum buildings put up during the 19th century.

The monumental structure, built at the behest of Emperor Franz Joseph I as part of his expansion of the city in 1858, was intended to both unite and appropriately represent the artistic treasures that had been collected by the Habsburgs over the centuries.

The Museum of Ethnology in Vienna is one of the most significant ethnological museums in the world. Its collections comprise more than 200,000 ethnographic objects, 25,000 historical photographs, 136,000 printed works, and over 300 kilometres of film on the history, culture, and quotidian life of predominantly non-European peoples.

Today the MFA is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world; the collection encompasses nearly 500,000 works of art. We welcome more than one million visitors each year to experience art from ancient Egyptian to contemporary, special exhibitions, and innovative educational programs. The online collection offers nearly 350,000 images.

The Museum of Modern Art offers over 72,000 works online.

The National Gallery houses the British national collection of Western European painting from the 13th to the 19th centuries. A complete list of paintings with images by each artist in the collection is available online.

The National Gallery of Art was conceived and given to the people of the United States by Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937). Mellon was a financier and art collector from Pittsburgh who came to Washington in 1921 to serve as secretary of the treasury. During his years of public service he came to believe that the United States should have a national art museum equal to those of other great nations. To date the museum has 83,896 images available online.

The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in three iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters. Since it was founded in 1870, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum's galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures. Offers 441,249 images for online viewing, downloading, and research.

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. The Rijksmuseum collection consists of over 1,000,000 items. The collection, formerly only accessible in Dutch, is now also presented in English.

The SIRIS Image Gallery contains a sampling of visual records that are part of the Collections Search Center. The Image Gallery includes over 530,000 electronic images from several archival repositories and museums at the Smithsonian.

"Step into Van Gogh's world. Discover the world's largest collection of works by Vincent van Gogh at the Van Gogh Museum, featuring masterpieces such as Almond Blossom and The Bedroom." Refdesk

The Victoria and Albert Museum is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design. The online collection offers the ability to search 644,544 images from the V&A’s collections, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and textiles.