LibGuides: Art: General Art Books & Images

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Archives of American Art The Archive holds more than thirteen million items consisting of the papers of artists, dealers, critics, art historians, curators, administrators and the records of art dealers, museums and other art-related businesses, institutions and organizations, including the digitized catalog of Jackson Pollock's first one-person show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century, held from Nov. 9-27, 1943.
Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world's diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public.
The Bridgeman Art Library Archive The Bridgeman Art Library is the world’s leading source of fine art, cultural and historical images. Its content is drawn from collections throughout the world, covering all periods, styles, concepts and mediums; from the classic masterpieces of national museums to the hidden gems of private collections.
Burton Holmes Digital Archive Burton Holmes was the first person to combine travel stories, slide shows and motion pictures into documentary travel lectures, for which he coined the word “travelogue.” The collection includes more than 16,000 hand-painted 3×4” glass lantern slides made between 1887 and 1937.
Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art The ICAA Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive provides access to primary sources and critical documents tracing the development of twentieth-century art in Latin America and among Latino populations in the United States.
Edvard Munch's Drawings
The Frick Collection The Frick Collection is a world-famous art museum and research center known for its Old Master paintings. Browse digital collections and even take a tour of the museum.
Gardner Museum Collections Isabella Stewart Gardner collected and carefully displayed a collection comprised of more than 2,500 objects—paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, drawings, silver, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, photographs and letters—from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world and 19th-century France and America. Browse the Gardner Museum's collections online by room, artist, genre and more.
Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections The Harry Ransom Center is an internationally renowned humanities research library and museum. Its extensive holdings provide a unique record of the creative process of writers and artists, deepening our understanding of literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts.
Hearst Museum of Anthropology
J. Paul Getty Museum The Getty Museum's Open Content Program makes available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. These images are free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.
Library of Congress American Memory Project The American Memory Project provides access to multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Digital Collections The Met has digitized much of its collections and makes extensive images freely available on the web.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston Find information on specific works of art, periods, and more.
Museum of Modern Art Online Collection Browse over 1,000 digitized works of art in MoMA's collection. Also searchable by artist, work or keyword.
National Gallery of Art Online Collections The National Gallery of Art's digital collection can be searched for a specific artist, title, or both.
National Museum of Women in the Arts The National Museum of Women in the Arts, the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the contributions of women artists.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery The NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs.
Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today.
The Walters Art Museum Online Collection Includes thousands of artworks and allows users to get detailed information, download high-quality digital images and create an online art collection through a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Canadian Online Art Book Project Find open-access, peer-reviewed e-books published by the Art Canada Institute and highlighting twentieth century Canadian Artists.
Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
Getty Publications Virtual Library Books on art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both the general public and specialists. Publications include illustrated works on artists and art history, exhibition catalogues, works on cultural history, research on the conservation of materials and archaeological sites, scholarly monographs, critical editions of translated works, and comprehensive studies of the Getty's collections.
Getty Research Portal Access digitized art history publications, rare books, and related literature.
Guggenheim eBooks The Guggenheim Museum has digitized many of its out-of-print publications and is offering them free. This is a treasure of art literature as well as great book cover design.
HathiTrust HathiTrust provides access to millions of digitized materials from around the world.
MetPublications Five decades of Metropolitan Museum of Art publications on art history are available to read, download, and/or search for free!
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg offers over 36,000 free ebook versions of titles in the public domain to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.

Go to the stacks and see what we have!

LC Call Number	Subject
N 1-(9211)	Visual Arts
N 1-58	General
N 61-72	Theory, Philosophy, Aesthetics
N 81-390	Study, Teaching, Research
N 400-3990	Art Museums, Galleries
N 4390-5098	Exhibitions
N 5198-5299	Private Collections & Collectors
N 5300-7418	History
N 7420-7525.8	General Works
N 7560-8266	Special Subjects of Art
N 8350-8356	Arts as a Profession. Artists
N 8510-8553	Art Studies, Materials
N 8554-8585	Examination & Conservation of Works of Art
N 8600-8675	Economics of Art
N 8700-9165	Art and the State. Public Art

Make sure you check permissions for using images. Unless an image has an explicit use statement, assume that you can use it for educational purposes with proper attribution (called "fair use"). Contact your librarian for more information.

ARTstor ARTstor is an online database of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images. Faculty in the Art Department may create their own image collections and presentations for class.

Art Images for College Teaching Free images for teaching art.
The Bridgeman Art Library Archive The Bridgeman Art Library is the world’s leading source of fine art, cultural and historical images. Its content is drawn from collections throughout the world, covering all periods, styles, concepts and mediums; from the classic masterpieces of national museums to the hidden gems of private collections.
The Café Review The Cafe Review is a quarterly journal of poetry, art and reviews that is based in Portland, Maine and has been published for over twenty years. Click on the Art Gallery link at the top of the page for extensive images of contemporary art.
Europeana Offers over 20 million digital images from Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections -- all of which are in the public domain.
Getty Images Getty Images allows you to search archival picture and film collections, including the Hulton Picture Archive, National Geographic, Time Life, Bridgeman Art Library.
Google Art Project Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
Life Magazine Photo Archive Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
MFA Images Search or browse more than 160,000 images from the collection of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
New York Public Library Picture Collection The NYPL Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.
Photogrammar Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
Rotch Library Visual Collections The Rotch Library at MIT provides free images of art an architecture, in Boston and beyond.
Shared Shelf Commons Shared Shelf Commons is a free, open-access library of images from libraries, archives, and museums around the world. Search and browse collections with tools to zoom, print, export, and share images.
Visual Collections This collection includes images from museums, universities and private collections throughout the world.
Web Gallery of Art The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism periods (1000-1850), currently containing over 27,600 reproductions. Picture commentaries, artist biographies are available.
Wikimedia Commons All of the images you'll find here have clear information about permission for use. Many are in the public domain.

Art: General Art Books & Images

Find Sources

Go to the stacks and see what we have!

Make sure you check permissions for using images. Unless an image has an explicit use statement, assume that you can use it for educational purposes with proper attribution (called "fair use"). Contact your librarian for more information.

What is Art?

Aesthetics