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Finding Images : Art & Architecture

This guide will show you how to find images for coursework, teaching and/or publication.

Art

AccessCeramics
accessCeramics is a growing collection of images of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists. It is designed for use by artists, arts educators, scholars and the general public, and is intended to fill a void in contemporary ceramics digital image collections on the web.
AIGA Design Archives
AIGA Design Archives is one of the richest online resources available to those who practice, study and appreciate great design. It represents the quality of work being created, as well as shifting aesthetics and sensibilities of the designers of the day. Included in this resource are more than 20,000 selections from AIGA’s annual juried design competitions dating from 1924 through the present.
ArtCyclopedia
Search over 6000 artists to find their works in museum collections or browse by movement, medium, subject, or nationality.
Art.Sy
This growing collection comprises 17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists from leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates. Art.sy works with 300+ of the worlds leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to Sco Paulo. Powered by The Art Genome Projectan ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of artArt.sy creates new pathways for discovering art through 800+ characteristics (we call them genes). Users can discover works through connections between art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities, creating infinite serendipitous opportunities for discovery and learning.
Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
A free-use image resource for the educational community arranged by art historical period and keyed to major art historical textbooks, i.e. Janson, Gardner, Hartt.
Beazley Archive (Oxford University; Greek and Roman art)
The art of ancient Greece and Rome, and its collection and reception since antiquity.
Bridgeman Art Library
Source of fine art images from over eight thousand collections and twenty nine thousand artists from museums, galleries and artists throughout the world. Offers basic, advanced and inspirational searches along with reproduction rights requirements.
Digital Scriptorium
The Digital Scriptorium is an image database for 5,300 manuscripts and for 24,300 images of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, intended to unite scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
Five College Museums/Historic Deerfield Collections Database
Provides access to information and images of over 60,000 objects held in the collections of Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Hampshire College Art Gallery, Historic Deerfield, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art and the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Getty Images
Search several picture and film archives collections, including the Hulton Picture Archive, National Geographic, Time Life, Bridgeman Art Library.
Google Art Project
High-resolution images of selected works from 16 museums around the world, including Gemaldegalerie, Berlin; National Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Versailles; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Uffizi, Florence; Museum Kampa, Prague; and more...
IDP International Dunhuang Project
More than 100,000 manuscripts, paintings and artifacts from Dunhaung and other Silk Road sites of the first millennium AD.
James J. Ross Archive of African Images, 1590-1920
James J. Ross Archive of African Images 1590-1920 is a database of approximately 5,000 pictures of African art published before 1921.
Joconde: Portail des Collections des Musées de France
A collection of over 500,000 images from across French museums
New York Public Library's Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the New Yorl Public Library's collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
Project Perseus
Over 30,000 images from clasical art and archaeology
Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées
Over 470 000 photographs of works of art collected in the national and regional museums of France--museums such as the Louvre, Orsay, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Picasso Museum.
VADS. The 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.
Visual collections: images of art, history and culture
Includes Cartography, Fine Arts, Architecture, Photography, and other image. Digital image collections from Museums, Universities and private collections throughout the world - by Cartography Associates (David Rumsey)
Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries.
WorldImages
Over 80,000 images from the California State University IMAGE Project.

Architecture

ArchINFORM
The largest online-database about worldwide architects and buildings from past to present for over 18000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners of the 20th century.
ARCHnet
ArchNet is an international online community for architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, conservationists, and scholars, with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilizations. This part of their website contains access to thousands of images available for educational use.
Asian Historical Architecture
A photographic survey of Asia's architectural heritage containing over 14,800 photos of 753 sites in twenty countries, with background information and virtual tours.
Casselman Archive of Islamic and Mudejar Architecture in Spain
A University of Wisconsin digital collection of over 4000 images of medieval Spain taken by Eugene Castleman.
Catena: Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes
(Bard Graduate Center) About 1,700 images and historical documentation for landscape design classes.
Cities and Buildings Database
A digital collection from the University of Washington containing over 10,000 images of buildings from around the world and throughout time.
Great Buildings Collection
Explore over 1000 great buildings from around the world and across history, with photographic images, architectural drawings, discussion, bibliography,(with links to Amazon.com) architect info, and live 3D walkthrough computer models.
Historic Homes from the Sears Archive
Images of Historic Homes from the collection of images and photographs of almost all 447 house designs from 1908 to 1940 from the Sears Archive
Library of Congress American Memory: American Landscape and Architectural Design 1850-1920
This teaching collection from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University comprises of the lantern slides from the schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and City Planning, which were combined in 1936 to form the Graduate School of Design. Approximately 2,800 images are available.
Library of Congress American Memory: Built in America Collection
Collection includes the Historic American Building Survey, the Historic American Engineering Record and the Historic American Landscapes Survey.
Library of Congess American Memory: Gottscho-Schlesiner Collection
A collection of 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.
Medieval Architecture
(University of Pittsburgh) Contains images and bibloigraphic information put together by Professor Alison Stones at the University of Pittsburgh. Also contains links to gateways to searchable image databases for Chartres Cathedral and the Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay, projects of University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library.
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
The Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project (PAB) is a regional initiative that dramatically expands free public access to information on the built environment of the five-county Philadelphia area and beyond, by providing a user-friendly, web-based, image rich resource. In an ambitious example of private, academic, and public cooperation, the PAB project brings together the collections, data, images and professional expertise of The Athenæum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives, the Philadelphia Historical Commission, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and many other local cultural institutions.
PhillyHistory
The Philadelphia City Archive is one of the country's largest municipal archives, with about 2 million photographs, dating from the late 1800's.
Royal Institute of British Architects
RIBApix is a database of unique images from the collections of the British Architectural Library at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the world’s most extensive visual archive devoted to architecture.

Last Updated: Aug 5, 2019 11:29 AM
URL: https://guides.library.upenn.edu/images
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Subjects: History of Art

Tags: images