LibGuides: Art and Art History: Find Images

Find Art Images

A list of some museums with notable image collections. These museums provide and extensive range of free digital images that can be used for personal, education, and non-commercial purposes. However, it's always recommended to check the specific terms on each museum's website to ensure compliance with their policies.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met)
Met Museum Open Access provides access to over 400,000 high-resolution digital images of artworks from their collection.
The Getty Museum
The Getty Open Content Program offers access to over 100,000 digital images of artworks from their collection, including paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and more.
The British Museum
The British Museum's Collection Online provides access to over 4.5 million objects, including images, with a focus on world history and culture.
The National Gallery of Art
NGA Images offers more than 51,000 open access digital images of artworks from the National Gallery of Art's collection.
The Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum's Rijkstudio offers high-resolution images of artworks from their collection, with over 700,000 artworks available for free download and creative use.
The Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Open Access Initiative provides access to millions of digital assets from the Smithsonian's museums, including images, 3D models, and data.
The National Gallery, London
The National Gallery's Collection offers access to over 25,000 images of artworks from their collection, including paintings, drawings, and prints.
The Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA)
LACMA's Collections Online provides access to over 80,000 high-resolution images of artworks from their collection.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
MoMA's Collection Online offers access to over 85,000 images of artworks from their collection, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, and more.
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago's Collection offers access to over 52,000 images of artworks including paintings, sculptures, prints, and decorative arts.

Art Images for College Teaching This link opens in a new window
Most current file. Unlimited users.
Emphasizing ancient, medieval, and Renaissance European art and architecture. AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large.
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Comprised of over 2.5 million digital images of visual material encompassing artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures. Focuses on, but is not limited to, the arts. Includes architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture. Designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images as well as by art historians.
In order to take advantage of all the features of the site, you must register or log in with the service. The registration and login links are visible once you enter the database.
DASE (Digital Archive Services) Collection This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
DASE is a web-based repository for digital images, sound, video and documents. Material on this site may be used for educational purposes by current faculty, students, and staff of the University of Texas at Austin. Use of these materials and resources is restricted by applicable license agreements and copyright law.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
Members of the public can read online up to three articles for free every two weeks from a large subset of JSTOR journals via the Register & Read program. This program allows remote access. Non-UT students, faculty and staff who need more articles can contact library staff for other access options.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

Briscoe Center for American History Digital Collections

Texas, Southern, Congressional and U.S. History image collections.
Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections

Rich collections of materials by writers and artists. Includes images. New material and collections are added on an ongoing basis.
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection

UT Libraries huge map collection

UT's Visual Resources Collection can be found on JSTOR. For more information about the VRC, please go to this LibGuide.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
Members of the public can read online up to three articles for free every two weeks from a large subset of JSTOR journals via the Register & Read program. This program allows remote access. Non-UT students, faculty and staff who need more articles can contact library staff for other access options.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

ARTstor Retirement

ARTstor's platform, JSTOR, is retiring the ARTstor database in August 2024. All of images from DASe and ARTstor will be migrated to JSTOR. You can find out more information if you click here. If you need to move your images from ARTstor to JSTOR, please visit this LibGuide for more instructions.

Questions? Please email Tina Tran, Visual Arts Liaison Librarian, with any questions or concerns.

Other Images

Need more information about finding other images or information about images in general? Check out this Images LibGuide for more comprehensive information.