LibGuides: Art History and Fine Arts: Finding Images on the Web

Finding Images on the Web

These websites provide access to freely accessible images in multiple formats. Copyright restrictions may apply to these images, so it is always best to check the image use guidelines, and when in doubt contact the rights and reproductions department of a particular website. Many of these images are offered by large and small museums, which display images of their collections and information about the objects.

Artsy
Artsy is an online marketplace to view, sell, and buy fine art. The site includes more than 100,000 works of art, and one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art freely accessible on the web. Their site also features a database of over 33,000 high resolution, open access images available for download.
Beazly Archive
The Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) is one of the strategic research units of the Oxford University Faculty of Classics. They provide access to images, notes, drawings, and books on aspects of ancient Greek and Roman art.
British Museum
Collection online allows access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records. High definition images can be enlarged and examined in detail.
Discover Islamic Art
Discover Islamic Art allows access to the world of Islam through art from 52 collections in 22 countries.
Getty Search Gateway
The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids.
JSTOR Forum Public Collections
Open content provided by partner institutions. Browse images from museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists.
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from museums, archives, libraries, and research units. There are 17.4 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with over 7.3 million images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals.
VADS
VADS provides a national collection of over 140,000 images from over 300 art and design collections across the UK, which are freely available for non-commercial use in education. The images cover the broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media. VADS is a service of the Library at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA).
Bishop Museum Ethnology Databse
Bishop Museum's Ethnology Collection includes more than 70,000 objects from throughout Hawai‘i and the Pacific region. Photographs and detailed information are available for more than two thousand objects.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a collection of 82,726,969 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. Not all the media files are of art, but this is a reliable source for finding images of art under open content licenses or in the public domain.You do not need to obtain a specific statement of permission from the licensor(s) of the content unless you wish to use the work under different terms than the license states.