Images for Designers and Art Researchers

Fine art, cultural and historical images from museums and collections around the world

Powered by the same type of cameras that inform Google Street View, this site allows you to navigate through major world museums and zoom in on selected artworks

European art images from books.

The Art & Architecture website has over 40,000 works from the Courtauld's collections.

This site enables visitors to browse and download jpegs of large format digital files created through projects supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Henry Luce Foundation and METRO. The collections include photoarchive images and documentation, book materials, Frick Collection images, and archival documents.

Thousands of images of artworks are available for download, without charge, under the Getty's Open Content Program.

The Collections database consists of entries for more than 480,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix. Updated on a daily basis, it is the result of the continuous research and documentation efforts carried out by teams of experts from both museums.

Over 400,000 works of art and design that can be refined by artist, object type/material, geography, date, and department. Most are Open Access.

MoMA’s evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art and design by over 10,000 artists. 66,000 works are available online.

Browse or search for paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and other works in the collection.

Open access images from the Paris municipal museums including the Petit Palais (decorative arts) and Musee Carnavalet (Paris history); works include books, prints, drawings, paintings, more.

Well-organized marketplace for antiques and furniture dealers

Examples of art work for sale by international galleries. Good source for contemporary art

Artsy features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 1,000,000 works of art, architecture, and design by 100,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art.

Art, antique and furniture auction records

Art and architecture images licensed for non-commercial use

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.

A portal to rich and unique scholarly resources on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world.

Comprehensive German art, architecture and design database that includes German posters, political cartoons and advertisements. German-language interface. Search for posters using the keyword "plakat."

Websites page lists various image-rich sources for researching decorative arts and design.

Comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Subjects are concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States, especially the New York City area, and Florida. Included are the homes of notable Americans, such as Raymond Loewy, and of several U.S. presidents, as well as color images of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Many of the photographs were commissioned by architects, designers, owners and architectural publications, and document important achievements in American 20th-century architecture and interior design.

Catalogs from 1950 to the present

World architecture images

Images Online is the Picture library of the British Library, the national library of the United Kingdom.

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.

MAID assets comprise a broad range of materials, including letters, art documentation and ephemera, images of artists and art-world personalities, installation photographs of MoMA and MoMA PS1 exhibitions, historical views of the Museum building and Sculpture Garden, administrative records, and more.

The Europeana online portal was launched in 2008 and provides access to over 19 million objects from European libraries, museums, archives, galleries, and audiovisual collections. More than 1,500 heritage institutions contribute cultural content. Objects relate to science, media and art and are available in different formats (text, images, audio/video, etc.) and in every European language.

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress.

The Media History Digital Library is a non-profit initiative, led by Eric Hoyt at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dedicated to digitizing historic books and magazines about film, broadcasting, and recorded sound for broad public access.

Images from Dutch history from the national library of The Netherlands.

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

The World Bank has a distinctive collection of over 13,000 images that illustrate development through topics such as Agriculture, Education, Environment, Health, Trade and more.