Art and Architecture: Finding Images

ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. The ARTstor Digital Library Charter Collection is a repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data and the tools to actively use those images.

The ARTstor Library is a collection of collections. It is the product of a growing number of collection development partnerships with individuals and institutions in the US and abroad. The ARTstor Library may be searched as an integrated whole or by its constituent collections.

Users of ARTstor may not use the content in ARTstor for any commercial purpose, including incorporating content in print or electronic publications distributed through a press (whether commercial or non-commercial). Additionally, users may not distribute widely ARTstor content, such as through unrestricted websites.

Bridgeman Education is an expanding resource currently comprising over 300,000 images representing objects from museums, galleries and private collections, as well as buildings and monuments. Its images cover visual culture worldwide, from pre-History to the present day. Media covered include photography, fine art, engravings, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, artefacts and applied arts. It addresses the interests of such disciplines as art, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, & ethnography, history, science & medicine.

All images are cleared for educational use.

The Index of Medieval Art (formerly Index of Christian Art) was founded by Professor Charles Rufus Morey (1877-1955) in 1917 and it is now the most important and largest archive of medieval art anywhere in the world. Nearly two thousand works of art are added to the archive on an annual basis.

The Index records works of art produced without geographical limitations from early apostolic times up to A.D. 1400 (extended in the case of the Morgan and Princeton Library projects to include this manuscript holdings up to the end of the sixteenth century). As is to be expected, there is a particular emphasis and focus on art of the western world. Seventeen different media are represented in the archive, and these include manuscripts, metalwork, sculpture, painting, glass, and so forth.

Parker on the Web is an interactive, web-based workspace designed to support

the use and study of over 500 MSS in the historic Parker Library at Corpus

Christi College, Cambridge. The Library's holdings of Old English texts account for a substantial proportion of all extant MSS in Anglo-Saxon,including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890) and unique copies of Old English poems. The project aimed to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page of most of the manuscripts. To provide a viewing environment for the images, an interactive web application was built which allows use by scholars and students in the context of supporting descriptive material and bibliography.

High-res images of American Vogue, Issue 1 (1892) – present. Every page, including advertisements, covers and fold-outs. You can search by (for example) garment type, designer and brand names.

Access to many of the world's public photography archives. Participants include the Natioanl Galleries of Scotland, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and New York Public Library.

Photographs and film footage documenting events and a changing society in C20th Italy, from L.U.C.E. (L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa, founded in 1924).

Originating with the Courtauld Institute’s multiple image archives, provides access to more than 40,000 images, plus a network of over half a million links.

Provides access to the online catalogue, and digital images of standard-size digitised and born-digital cartoons held by the British Cartoon Archive (BCA).

The BCA is a national collection of socio-political cartoons from British newspapers and magazines, plus comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The online catalogue contains over 150,000 cartoons either held at the BCA or by other institutions. Often you can see various versions of the same cartoon from the sketch to the artwork to the various published versions. The cataloguing includes subject terms and identifies the people depicted in the cartoons.

Full-text archive (1897-2005) of the weekly British culture and lifestyle magazine, Country Life. Focuses on fine art and architecture; the UK’s great country houses and their collections, gardens and landscaping; and rural living, including activities such as art and antique collecting, hunting, shooting, equestrian news and gardening.

Images of country houses and gardens, interiors and architectural details, historic buildings and churches from the photo-archive of Country Life magazine. All images reference the original Country Life articles for which they were commissioned.

Access to the massive photographic collection (ca. 200,000 images) assembled by art historian and connoisseur Fererico Zeri. The photographs document mainly Italian art, located in Italy and also elsewhere.

The digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France giving access to over 90,000 items of printed material (books, periodicals, newspapers etc.) and more than 80,000 images (engravings, maps, etc.) Lists of periodicals, dictionaries, texts are available.

Online Catalogue of the George Clarke print collection.

The catalogue was compiled by Timothy Clayton and Ben Thomas between 1995 and 1999. It contains some 8,000 entries for the prints in the collection bequeathed to Worcester College by George Clarke (1661-1736).

Description : Photographs, as well as photographs of art works taken from the archive of Life magazine. Major areas covered : People, Places, Events, Sports and Culture.

Free and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from New York Public Library's vast collections; includes illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, , photographs, etc.

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 11 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 teaching, learning and research in the UK.

VADS offers advice and guidance to the visual arts research, teaching and learning communities on all aspects of digital resource management from funding, through delivery and use, to preservation.

Online catalogue of the collections of France’s national museums.

Online catalogue of French 17th and 18th century paintings in German collections.

Online catalogue of 13th – 19th century Italian paintings in French public collections. In progress.

Arts on Film Archive offers on-line access to a large range of films on art produced in the United Kingdom since the 1950s, and is a unique record of British and international post-war art, as well as of documentary film-making in the UK. Many titles in the collection contain rare material about individual artists, while others offer definitive coverage of their subject. The archive is an invaluable primary research resource for a wide range of scholars in arts and humanities. Its films contain valuable source material for biographies, monographs, and many other forms of research in art history and documentary film-making.

Prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain.

The David Rumsey Collection was started nearly 20 years ago, and focuses primarily on cartography of the Americas from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, school geographies, books, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps, including pocket, wall, children's and manuscript.

ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. The ARTstor Digital Library Charter Collection is a repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data and the tools to actively use those images.

The ARTstor Library is a collection of collections. It is the product of a growing number of collection development partnerships with individuals and institutions in the US and abroad. The ARTstor Library may be searched as an integrated whole or by its constituent collections.

Users of ARTstor may not use the content in ARTstor for any commercial purpose, including incorporating content in print or electronic publications distributed through a press (whether commercial or non-commercial). Additionally, users may not distribute widely ARTstor content, such as through unrestricted websites.

Bridgeman Education is an expanding resource currently comprising over 300,000 images representing objects from museums, galleries and private collections, as well as buildings and monuments. Its images cover visual culture worldwide, from pre-History to the present day. Media covered include photography, fine art, engravings, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, artefacts and applied arts. It addresses the interests of such disciplines as art, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, & ethnography, history, science & medicine.

All images are cleared for educational use.

VADS is the online resource for visual arts. It has provided services to the academic community for 11 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 teaching, learning and research in the UK.

VADS offers advice and guidance to the visual arts research, teaching and learning communities on all aspects of digital resource management from funding, through delivery and use, to preservation.

The John Johnson Collection is one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world. It was assembled by John de Monins Johnson between c.1923 and 1956 and was housed at the Oxford University Press (where it was called The Constance Meade Collection of Ephemeral Printing) until its transfer to the Bodleian Library in 1968. Johnson collected retrospectively, establishing 1939 as his terminus ante quem (although there are exceptions). While the majority of material dates from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, there is ephemera dating back to 1508. There are over 1 million items in the original collection. The material is principally British.