Research Guides: Finding Images: Art & Design

Top Resources

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
ARTstor holds over two million digital images of cultural objects representing the arts, humanities, and sciences. Software includes zoom and download features. Excellent quality for presentations.
Building Oregon This link opens in a new window
Building Oregon, an Oregon Digital collection, provides access to over 23,000 images and documents about the built environment and outdoor cultural artifacts such as sculpture in the Pacific Northwest, primarily Oregon.

Lowenstam Collection of Ancient Western Art & Archaeology
The slide collection of UO Classics professor Steven Lowenstam (1945-2003) is composed primarily of ceramics in European and American museums, architecture and archaeological sites across southern Europe.

Art and Architecture Images Collection This link opens in a new window
Digital images of art, architecture, and other cultural objects acquired for use by the University of Oregon community.

Oregon Percent for Art

Index of Medieval Art This link opens in a new window
Records for works of art from early apostolic times to A.D. 1400 (and through the end of the sixteenth century for manuscript holdings), with an emphasis on western art.
These records are illustrated by more than 60,000 images. This database is considered a premier resource for iconographical studies. NOTE: Browser must allow popups to view images.

Museum Collections & Digital Projects

Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg provides access to images related to European art and architecture. Approximately 2 million images of the art and architecture from thirteen European countries contributed by about 80 partnering institutions including archives, museums, universities and research institutes.

Courtauld Institute of Art. A collection of more than 40,000 images, mostly black and white, drawn from resources at the Courtauld Institute, University of London.

Digital Portrait Index. A German Research Foundation (DFG) project, this database contains over 250,000 portraits from major German museum and library collections.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History provides a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. First launched in 2000, the Timeline extends from prehistory to the present day. It will continue to expand in scope and depth, and reflect the most up-to-date scholarship.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 20,000 open accessdigital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.

New York Public Library Digital Gallery. NYPL Digital Gallery offers thousands of digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more. Collections cover artworks and objects, creators, dance, design, furniture, motion pictures, music, ornament, performance, spectacle, theatre, advertising, book binding, dust jackets, friendship books, menus, post cards, posters, trade and greeting cards.

Smithsonian Collections Search Center: Digital Collections. Approximately 600,000 images, video and audio available from across the Smithsonian's vast collections

United Kingdom National Trust Image Collections. Over 750,000 images of British historic architecture and objects of material culture

VADS: Visual Arts Data Service (UK). Over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research

Visual Collections. Over 300,000 images from museums, universities and private collections can be found through this site which uses LUNA Insight as its viewer. LUNA Commons is another website that contains many of these collections, but that also offers users tools to create groups of images and share content.

ThingStor
A material culture database, ThingStor documents historical, “real” objects as they appear in American and English literature and visual art during the long 19th century.