Fine Arts

Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889 | The Getty Museum (Accessed via the Getty Open Content Program)

Fine Arts Image Resources

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art: More than 20,000 high quality downloadable images of artworks from their encyclopedic collection believed to be in the public domain—available without restriction, and free of charge.
• Walters Museum of Art: Find thousands of artworks from around the world and across the centuries. Get detailed infromation about the artworks including conservation and exhinition history. Search, tag and download high quality digital images.
• Rijksmuseum: Over 125,000 high-resolution images available for download.
• National Gallery of Denmark
• Brooklyn Museum
• The Frick Museum: The Library is digitizing its collection of 57,000 rare, original negatives of works of art through several grant-funded projects and making it freely available through the Frick Digital Image Archive.
• Philadelphia Museum of Art: Images of many of the works in the collection may be downloaded directly from PMA Collections Online. These images are supplied at no charge and may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes.
• The Hermitage Museum: a virtual gallery of high-resolution images from the Museum.
• The Prado Museum: Access online to approximately 1000 works of the Museum's collection (more than 5000 works available in spanish version).
• Museum of New Zealand: over 30,000 images available for download and re-use in high resolution.
• Victoria and Albert Museum: Over a million data records are searchable, although fewer images are available. Free high-resolution images available for educational use or academic publications. 
• Freer / Sackler Galleries: Images of objects from the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries.
• Getty Museum: Contains images of many of the artworks held and displayed by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.
• Guggenheim Museum: This online collection contains selected classic works and more recent acquisitions from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art: Provides access to images held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including highlights from each of the curatorial departments as well as the entire Department of European Paintings and the entire Department of American Painting and Sculpture.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Contains images of objects from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
• Museum of Modern Art, New York: The online collection of the Museum of Modern Art includes artists and objects from the departments of Architecture and Design, Drawings, Painting and Sculpture, Prints and Illustrated Books, and Film and Media.
• National Gallery of Art: Contains text and/or data on all of the objects in the National Gallery's collection, and images of more than 5600 objects. Data records for more than 110,000 objects, and 20,000 image files are available for download.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: American art, craft, and design from all regions, traditions, and cultures. Search over 8.59 million catalog records of museum objects, and library & archives materials. More than 963,000 of these records contain online images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other online resources.
• The Tate Collection: An online database of works in the Tate Collection, plus an illustrated glossary.
• Yale University Art Gallery: Works from the Gallery, including paintings, decorative arts, arms and armor, and more. Searchable by department, classification, artist, etc.
• Musée du Louvre: Offers a simple search of the museum's collections and access to several national databases.  Links to the museum's Atlas database of exhibited works where low-resolution images can be downloaded.
• VADS / online resource for visual arts: Visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images from institutional sources contributed for use in learning, teaching and research. Includes art, design, architecture, decorative art, fashion. UK-based.
• Web Gallery of Art: A database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 13,900 reproductions

Images on the Web

ARTstor and the library website are always adding new images. However, you may not find what need on ARTstor. These websites contain great collections of images as well:

• Google Art Project
  Google's collection of image's from museums and cultural institutions from around the world.
• WorldImages (SJSU)
  Over 50,000 images, including significant art and architecture collections, which "may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes."
• New York Public Library Digital Collections
  Over 600,000 images from the collections of the NYPL, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs...
• Calisphere
  Historical images of California including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts.
• Victoria & Albert Museum (London)
  The V&A is a world-class museum of art and design. The Museum holds over 3,000 years worth of artefacts from many of the world's richest cultures. Their online image database allows you to search for over 1,000,000 works from the V&A's collections, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture and textiles.
• Metropolitan Museum (New York)
  The Collection Database is a searchable database of artworks and related materials from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• San Francisco MOMA
  SFMOMA's online collection of modern and contemporary art includes holdings in photography, painting and sculpture, architecture and design, and media arts.
• Historical Anatomies
  Anatomical illustrations
• Flickr Creative Commons search
  Search for images posted to the popular photo sharing site which are published under an open license that allows reuse
• Google Image Search
  Click on Advanced search to limit results by size, filetype and coloration.
• CCA Images and Archives »
  This database contains over 3,500 digital images and records for a variety of CCA's image and archive collections.

Slides

CCA has been working on digitizing the slide collection since 2004. These images are now available through the ARTstor image database. The slide collection is still available for faculty use, please contact Teri Dowling (tdowling@cca.edu) for more information.

A note about using images

Most images you will come across are protected by copyright. Images from ARTstor, the CCA Libraries slide collection and Worldimages are available for your use for educational purposes. Be careful if you use images from other sources, as you may be violating copyright. Just because it's freely available, doesn't mean that it's not copyright protected. Know the rules and use images fairly and conscientiously. For additional information, see our guide on how to cite images and our guide on copyright and fair use.