Art and visual images: Home

Google Arts and Culture

Search by artist, artistic movements, medium or places. High quality images. Clicking on image provides you with citation info.

Creative Commons

Use Creative Commons search to find images that have been licensed for re-use. Read the Rights section to see if you can use the image. Bet bet: search flickr for images of art, architecture, cityscapes, etc. Be sure to site the creator and give credit in a caption.

Many museums have great websites for their collections -- try a Google search to find a particular museum, or get started with the ones we've listed below.

Here's a list from Wikipedia of the most visited art museums in the world. Each entry links to that museum's Wikipedia page. The official website for the museums can often be found at the bottom of its entry, under "External links."

General collections

• The Getty Large, general collection. Search the J. Paul Getty Museum of  Los Angeles' image database. Download and gather information for citation.
•  The Met Large general collection. Search the Metropolitan Museum of New York's image database (almost 500,000 images.) Download and gather information for citation.
• Museum of Fine Arts Boston Large general collection
• National Gallery of Art Large general collection. 
• The World According to Art Blog for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. High quality images of pieces from their exhibits and collections.

By region

Asia

• Asian Art Museum Search this San Francisco museum's collection of over 12,000 objects from a variety of Asian countries.
• Silk Road Database The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 11,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars.

France

• Altas (In English) The Atlas database covers all the works exhibited in the Louve (Paris) - some 30,000 items.
• Images D'Art (In English) Discover, collect and share photographs of more than 500,000 works held in French museum collections.
• Joconde (In French) Database of the collections of the state museums of France. Over 300,000 description and images of art from all over the world.

Italy

• Bagatti Valsecchi Museum (in Italian) From the museum's collection in Milan. Includes art, musical instruments, precious objects, clocks and scientific equipment and armaments.
• Casa Buonarroti (in Italian) Works by Michelangelo.
• Uffizi Gallery Variety of high quality images of paintings from the Italian Renaissance.
• Vatican Museums Many works by Italian artists, primarily religious in nature.

With your Boston Public Library card, you can access Grove Art Online. This resource contains the full searchable text and images of Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.