Research Guides: Art: Visual Resources

Page Contents

Citing Images

For APA, 7th edition:

Artist Lastname, Firstinitial. (Year of release). Title of artwork [medium]. Name of owning museum, Location City, State, Country. URL of page on which the image appears.

For MLA:

Artist Lastname, Firstname. Title of work. Date of creation. Owning Institution/Gallery/Museum, Location City. Name of Website, URL of page on which the image appears.

APA Style and Formatting (OWL)
Quick guide for citing resources in APA style.
MLA Style and Formatting (OWL)
Quick guide to citing resources using MLA style.

Searching for Articles VS Searching for Images:

Articles: key terms in the scholarship

Images: period, movement, school, country, artist

Find Images

Saskia Digital Image Archive
Contains 30,000 digital images of paintings, sculpture, and architecture, including images from many important collections: the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Uffizi, and the Louvre as well as archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Egypt. Choose "Browse Collection OFF Campus" for smoothest experience.

Cooper Hewitt Collection
Located in NYC, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum allows you to search by color, country, people, period, and more. Images can be reused for "fair use" educational purposes, with attribution.
Cary Graphic Arts Collection
Includes digitized portions of the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. collection, from 2,300 volumes on typology and graphic arts. Searchable images database, timeline, and browse by collection.
Ad*Access, Duke University
Digital collection of over 7,000 ads from 1911 to 1955.
Life Magazine Archive, Google Books
1936-1972. Free PDFs from Google Books. Print Life Magazine copies are available in the basement of Morris Library.
Internet Archive Book Images, Flickr
A photostream with more than 2.5 million images taken from books digitized by the Internet Archive. All images here were published before 1923 and are in the public domain.
SPACES Archive
SPACES Archives currently houses information on over 1400 self-taught our outsider art pieces from all over the world, with 479 pieces in the online collection.

Images Licensed for Reuse

These images are publicly available or have limited restrictions. Remember that public domain is always "to the best of our knowledge" and use images according to the restrictions described by each hosting site.

Art Images for College Teaching
A set of public domain. images created by Minneapolis College of Art & Design students and staff.
Art Resource
More than 400,000 searchable fine art images, three million transparencies, and black and white photographs of works of painting, sculpture, architecture and the minor arts. All images are subject to the copyright terms of the owners (often museums and galleries in this case).
Open Content Images, Getty Search Gateway
Provides tens of thousands of images from various collections. to aid in the teaching of art and art history, including over 88,000 artworks.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
More than 1.2 million digitized images from the Library of Congress, many in the public domain.
Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Digital Collection
These images of items in the Met's collection are available for free download and use.
National Gallery of Art Open Access
Repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. More than 29,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.
Rijksstudio Search from the Rijksmuseum
A Dutch national museum of art and art history, which has made high-resolution images of art in its collection available for download and reuse via its Rijks Studio software.
Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum containing over 52,000 images, focusing on European painting and sculpture. Search by artist name, or the generalized search engine.
Wikimedia Commons
Searchable wiki of images, video, and more, most of which are under Creative Commons License or in the public domain, so they can be reused and transformed.

Copyright Info

ARTStor Images for Academic Publishing
The Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program makes available publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications free of charge.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in the Visual Arts
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, CAA created this guide for fair use and the arts. The guide covers fair use for: Analytic Writing, Teaching about Art, Making Art, Museum Uses, and Online Access to Archival and Special Collections.
more...less...
used in the text box at the top of the Visual Resources page of the Art and Design guide
Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University
Columbia's Copyright Office provides a useful guide to Fair Use, use of copyrighted materials in education and publishing, and locating and getting licensing permissions.
Copyright and Art: Issues that Matter to Creators and Users
From the University of Oregon, an in-depth look at the copyright issues surrounding art, fair use, and the public domain.
Model Permission Letters from Columbia's Copyright Advisory Office
Includes sample letters for video use, text use, and use of material in a course management system.

Morris Library

Art: Visual Resources