LibGuides: Art Resources: Home

What is This and Why am I here?

This guide is a curated collection of resources to support art students in their research, inspiration, and creative practice. It includes links to library databases, digital image collections, museum websites, and other trusted sources for studying and exploring the visual arts. Whether you're researching art history or seeking inspiration for your next project, this guide is a helpful starting point.

Museums

Art Institute of Chicago
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.
British Museum Collection Database
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.
Denver Art Museum
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.
Getty Museum
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 and Culture
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.
Guggenheim Museum Collection 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.
Hermitage Museum Digital Collection
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.
Japanese E-Museum
High resolution images of national treasures and important cultural properties owned by 4 National Museums (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Kyusyu) with 5 languages commentary.
Kunsthistorisches Museum
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.

more... less...

Construction work lasted 20 years, from when ground was first broken in 1871 to the museum building’s completion in the year 1891.
Museum of Ethnology
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.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art offers over 72,000 works online.
The National Gallery, London
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.
National Gallery of Art (Washington)
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.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.
Rijksmuseum, a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam
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.
Smithsonian Institution SIRIS Image Gallery
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.
Van Gogh Museum Collection
"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
Victoria and Albert Museum
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.

Stock Images

Getty Images
Royalty-free stock images that are great to use for your next project. Does cost money to get the non-watermarked images, but they have educational-based pricing by request.
Pexels
Free stock photos and videos you can use everywhere. High-quality, Free, and No attribution needed.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock is another stock image website. Royalty-free, but does require money to buy the items without a watermark image. Also has great resources for videos, films, animation and graphic design with templates to help you on your project.
The Stocks
Stunning FREE images & royalty-free stock images (for the most part)! All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.
Unsplash
Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.

Design and Visual Media Tools

Create designs for all your posts, flyers, and visual needs!

Adobe Express
Quickly and Easily Make Standout Content from Beautiful Templates with Adobe Express. Make Stunning Graphics and Video Stories in Just a Few Taps at Any Skill Level. Explore All Features. Do More with Your Stories. Customizable Templates.
Canva
Free to use! Upgrade to Pro for a price per month//year for more features.
Easil
Easil is the drag-and-drop design tool that empowers your whole team to create visual content. It's FREE to get started, but you can purchase a subscription to access some features.
GIMP
GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, (alternative to Adobe Photoshop), is a FREE & open source image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows, and more operating systems.
Giphy
FREE To Use GIFs! You can also upload or create your own GIFs.
Photopea
Free Online Photo Editor! Photopea is a web-based graphics editor which can work with raster and vector graphics. It can be used for image editing, making illustrations, web design, or converting between different image formats. Completely free for you to use.
Polotno Studio
Polotno Studio is a FREE design editor. Use the large library of photos and vector illustrations to create images for social media, youtube previews, covers, and presentations.
Scribus
Scribus (alternative to Adobe Indesign) is FREE and open-source desktop publishing software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for the layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms.

Electronic Resources

Archives of American Art - Smithsonian
"Founded in Detroit in 1954 by Edgar P. Richardson, then Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Lawrence A. Fleischman, a Detroit executive and active young collector, the initial goal of the Archives was to serve as microfilm repository of papers housed in other institutions." About page

more... less...

"This mission expanded quickly to collecting and preserving original material and, in 1970, the Archives joined the Smithsonian Institution, sharing the Institution’s mandate—the increase and diffusion of knowledge." About page

Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
Art Full Text™ is a comprehensive resource for art information featuring full-text articles from more than 300 periodicals dating back to 1995, high-quality indexing and abstracting of over 600 periodicals dating as far back as 1984, including 280 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracting of over 13,000 art dissertations. Indexing of almost 200,000 art reproductions provides examples of styles and art movements, including works by emerging artists. The database covers fine, decorative and commercial art, folk art, photography, film, and architecture, and also includes a database-specific thesaurus.
Artstor Public Collection
Public Collections
Artstor’s ever-growing public collections offer approximately 1 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anyone may view and download these collections at library.artstor.org; no subscription or login required.

Atlas - English version of the Louvre online collection
The Atlas database covers all the works exhibited in the museum - some 30,000 items.
Internet users, like museum visitors, will find the usual explanatory texts that accompany museum exhibits, compiled under the authority of the museum curators.
New images are currently being added to the database, which is constantly updated.
Biblical Art
Biblical art

Stories in the bible have always inspired artists. In this section you will find a selection of such biblical art, including many highlights from the history of art. Home Page
Bibliography of the History of Art
The Getty provides access to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and to the Répertoire de la litterature de l'art (RILA) for no charge on its Web site at http://library.getty.edu/bha. The databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007.

more... less...

About RILA and BHA
RILA covers the years 1975–1989. It was produced at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Michael Rinehart was the editor-in-chief. In 1982, Getty began to support RILA, and in 1990 the Getty began to collaborate with INIST-CNRS to produce the BHA, which was a merger of RILA and the Répertoire d'art et d'archéologie.

A list of journals in BHA (PDF, 308 K) can be downloaded. BHA includes articles from over 1,200 journals. The link above leads to a list of names and ISSNs of each of those journals. BHA includes all articles within the subject scope of BHA regardless of the subject focus of a particular journal. Thus, many of the journals on this list are covered partially, as only some of their articles are within BHA's scope.
Cartoon Images
"The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum's digital image database contains scanned images from our collection. Search here to see our existing scans; however, keep in mind that this is only a small portion of our total collection. Some images are scanned from the original art while others are scanned from newspaper tear sheets or other printed sources." Home Page

more... less...

"Requests for digital images must be accompanied by a Digital Request Form available on our website. If you don't find the image you are looking for, please contact us at cartoons@osu.edu." Home Page
Cleveland Museum of Art
Bringing the CMA’s mission “For the Benefit of All the People, Forever” into the digital age, you can now share, collaborate, remix and reuse images of as many as 30,000 public domain artworks from the CMA’s world renowned collection of art for commercial, scholarly and non-commercial purposes.
Discover Yale Digital Commons
Yale has "open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections at Yale University" - Yale Daily Bulletin article.
Elizabethan clothing for men
Elizabethan Costume Guide
"The Elizabethan period is well-known for its fashion which served as a form of self-expression among all social classes. Women of that era were garments that covered nearly every area of skin on the body, from neck to ankle. Gowns were fitted snugly against the body to accent the square shoulders and small waist. Wealthier women often wore a French “hood” around the neck and large gold pendants." Home page
Elizabethan Costume - Jewelry
Elizabethan Costume Page
An amazing site that gives instructions on making certain historical garments and costumes.

more... less...

The Elizabethan Costume Page is ©1996-2008 by Drea Leed. All Rights Reserved.
Elizabethan Costume History
English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course
"WELCOME to English Handwriting 1500-1700: An online course. This resource has been designed for students and scholars of early modern English letters, history, theology, and philosophy--for anyone whose research will embrace original English manuscript sources in this period." Welcome page
Google Art Project
View art works from Art Museums using Google's amazing tools.
Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web
From the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, explore the rich variety of topics, images, and materials featured in online exhibitions from libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums around the world.
Tudor Effigies: Costume Research Image Library
"The Costume Research Image Library has expanded with the addition of effigies from Sussex. A further 17 monuments in 15 churches are now available online after research into 50 Sussex churches. There are 36 new effigies (or groups of effigies) in civilian dress represented of which 24 are women and 12 men. The Tudor effigies database now offers 76 main images from Hampshire and Sussex." Welcome page
Turn of the Century Posters
"Over 1,000 American and European posters printed from 1893 through the first years of the 20th-century. The collection represents the inception and heyday of magazine, book, and newspaper posters of the last decade of the 19th-century, and well into the 20th-century." Home page
Van Gogh Museum Collection
"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
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters
All the surviving letters written and received by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) are contained in this edition of his correspondence.11. Over and above the 902 surviving letters, there must have been at least 550 letters written to Van Gogh, and at least 290 letters written by Van Gogh that we no longer have (see Correspondents, Lost correspondence). Excepting only the digital form in which they are now being published, this is the continuation of a long tradition.

more... less...

The first broadly-conceived edition appeared in 1914, when Jo van Gogh-Bonger published Vincent van Gogh. Brieven aan zijn broeder in three volumes and opened up the nucleus of the correspondence to the general public. It was followed by translations and separate supplementary publications. In 1952-1954 all the correspondence known at that time was brought together by Jo’s son, V.W. van Gogh, in the monumental, four-volume work Verzamelde brieven van Vincent van Gogh. This in turn was translated into several languages, providing a further boost to the already increasingly international research into Van Gogh. In 1990 the Van Gogh Museum seized the opportunity presented by the commemoration of the centenary of Van Gogh’s death to produce a completely new edition that included finds made since the publication of the 1952-1954 edition. The approach, too, was new. No longer were the letters arranged by correspondent as – broadly speaking – they had been in the earlier editions, and each letter had a date derived to a significant extent from Jan Hulsker’s pioneering work in this area. Unlike its predecessors, however, this edition presented all the letters in modern Dutch, including those originally written in French and the few written in English; Van Gogh’s nineteenth-century spelling in the Dutch letters was modernized.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute
Mission & History
The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. is non-profit, private foundation dedicated to the compilation of digital catalogue raisonnés and archives that support research in the field of art history.

Art Resources

Effective Research Tips

Animation Resources

Search Library Catalog

Search Mack Library

INDY (Information DiscoverY at BJU Mack Library)

Ask a Librarian

What is This and Why am I here?

Museums

Stock Images

Design and Visual Media Tools

Electronic Resources