Art & Architectural History

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 12 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK.

An extensive content library containing stock photos and images

An aggregate of 151 art collections from museums around the world set in a dynamic user friendly platform. View or create shared personal collections for research and inspiration.

A contemporary art marketplace with image database

A research database which provides substantive and scholarly documentation on Rembrandt's works, including historical and technical information and conservation history.

High-resolution images of art from the famed museum.

This online gallery contains over 30,000 images from the British Library's collection.

With more than 2 million records, the database is based on the British Museum's collection management tool. Utilizes specialised terms, abbreviations and shorthand.

University of California's free public gateway to digitized items including photographs, documents, political cartoons, and other unique cultural artifacts.

30,000 high-res images of public-domain artworks in the CMA collection, plus metadata relevant to more than 61,000 works are available without restriction, whether the works themselves are in the public domain or under copyright.

Allows searching of over 250,000 artworks from Britain's national collections.

Europeana is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe.

A project by Fashion Institute of Technology's History of Art Department. The Timeline offers scholarly contributions to the public knowledge of the history of fashion and design.

The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required. Read more about this initiative here: http://www.getty.edu/about/opencontent.html

Recording America's built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 581,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 43,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.

LACMA offers 20,000 high-quality unrestricted images of art from their collection, and are available for everyone to download and use freely.

The PPOC Collection offers over 1.2 million digitized images, drawn from primarily American history, including photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.

Images of art and design throughout history, presented in timeline format.

Browse or search the MoMA collections.

The 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.

NGA Images is a repository of open access digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. 29,000 images are available for non-commercial use.

Access to hundreds of thousands of images crossing many disciplines with an emphasis on manuscripts, posters, prints and photographs.

125,000 high resolution digital images free to use and manipulate.

The image gallery contains over 8,000 photographs, letters, sketches, diaries, and other documents which have been scanned and individually described. Small resolution images are available without watermark for educational use.

Download, share, and reuse nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Search over 1 million image and object records relating to objects in the Victoria & Albert collections.

Search 1.5 million records in the areas of art, natural history, books, and maps, photographs, audio, video, and materials specific to the University in Yale's digital collection. Access is free.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find listings of institutional image banks in the United States and elsewhere.

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. DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. United States and world content coverage.

"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world."

An amazing site for all things avant-garde. "UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." Includes full length videos, interview archives, an archive of conceptual writing, a WFMU radio show, and many more gems.

Five decades of Met publications on art history, available to read, download, and search for free.

The Getty Research Portal is an online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts in the public domain.

AAA’s collection is a dynamic, growing body of material intended to reflect contemporary artistic practice and developments of Asia within an international context. The collection includes scanned images, correspondences, artists’ personal documents, and streaming audio and video of performance art, artist talks, lectures, and other art events.